


Hearts Steeled to Hardship

by ecphrasis



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arranged Marriage, Colonialism, F/M, Fire Lord Zuko, Fire Nation Politics (Avatar), Fluff and Smut, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Imperialism, Infertility, Katara says ACAB, Mutual Pining, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:06:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26399137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecphrasis/pseuds/ecphrasis
Summary: Katara doesn’t mean to feel what she does for her distant husband, the Fire Lord.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 123
Kudos: 573





	1. Chapter 1

Ordinarily a Fire Nation husband and wife break their fast together, but no matter how early Katara rises, Zuko is always up first. Even when he infrequently asks her to dine with him so that they can discuss something over the light quarterbread and fresh fruits favored by the Fire Nation nobles, he comes to her after having completed at least one meeting, and most often two.

She doesn’t know what time he rises. She assumes it’s around the third watch of the night, though Tui knows it could be earlier. Maybe he doesn’t sleep at all.

She doesn’t know what time her husband rises because he doesn’t often share her bed.

It’s humiliating to think how eager she was the last time, how desperately she kissed him, how quickly she fell apart beneath his tender touch. It would be one thing if they were in love, if she was anything more than a political alliance to him, if she meant more than a guarantee of goodwill and harmony, but they’re not, and she isn’t, and she doesn’t. At best, she’s someone whom he talks to. At best, they’re almost friends, from whom custom requires the production of a child.

On their wedding night, back when he was only The Fire Lord to her, and she was merely the sister of the newly elected chief of the Federated Southern Water Tribe, they’d both fully participated in their shared cultural tradition of becoming entirely intoxicated during their wedding.

At first, she’d had to force down the bitter crimson wine that was served to them in golden goblets, but when he’d caught her wincing at its taste, he’d summoned one of his omnipresent servants to bring her a lighter vintage. She’d found the sweet white wine from Igni Fallow much more palatable. He stuck steadfastly to the bitter stuff; he even claimed that he enjoyed the way its taste lay like river sediment on the tongue, impossible to wash away even with cold water. They’d first laughed together then, over her exaggerated distaste and his exaggerated love for the red wine.

Their laughter had silenced the nobles surrounding them, and the Fire Lord’s surprisingly open face had snapped instantly into an emotionless mask.

She found out later that it was considered bad luck to laugh at a wedding.

Even so, he’d poured her more of the yellow wine, and she’d cajoled him into having a glass himself, to keep her company.

And afterwards, long after midnight, he’d made a valiant effort to remain steady, so that she could lean on him without stumbling over her unfamiliar Fire Nation sandals and heavy, multi-layered blue and crimson wedding himation.

She’d expected pain. He was Fire Nation after all, and beneath all the pomp and splendor of his court lay the repugnant history of ethnocide and desecration and bloodshed. She had agreed to the marriage because she knew that with the Avatar long dead, and the world all but consumed by a full century of war, a union between the Southern Water Tribe and the Fire Nation was her people’s only hope at survival. If she had to endure what her people had endured for one hundred years, then so be it.

But instead he’d bent to help her undo the long, trailing leather ties of her strange summer sandals, and he’d slipped off his own gold embroidered mojari. He reached upward to brush a flyaway strand of hair from her face, and despite herself, she flinched backwards from his touch.

She can still see the way his face contorted in ill-hidden agony, the way guilt and grief and resignation flashed with drunken openness across his flame-scarred visage.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “We have to do this, but we can be quick. I won’t ask you to do anything-” he paused, and swallowed. “Anything more than what we swore we’d do.”

Her memories of their first time are vague, insubstantial, wine-sodden fractals. She can picture him shaking his hair out after releasing it from its topknot, each jet-black strand catching and reflecting the dim candlelight.

She can feel the way the bed yielded when she fell back against it, eiderdown stuffed and impossibly giving beneath her weight.

She can feel his lips, warm and insistent against her own, and she can hear her gasp when he kissed the pulse-point in her throat. Her entire body had prickled at his touch, and he’d huffed in muted amusement at the way she trembled.

Of her own volition, she’d undone the symbolic knots that tied his crimson kandys, and she’d allowed him to slide the alien, shoulder-bearing himation from her body. 

He was careful with the fabric, probably cognizant of the cost of murex-dyed cloth. It was more plentiful in the Fire Nation than it was in the south, but even so, her ten foot long and five foot wide mantle would easily cost a common footsoldier a five year stipend.

He’d been so hesitant to touch her, so eager to gain her approval, so desperate not to make her fear him.

The sex itself she remembers only in snatches. Mostly, she remembers the way he did not meet her eyes, the way he left her alone afterwards, when all she wanted was to be held, even if it was by a stranger.

She hadn’t cried before, but she did cry then, with ridiculous, heaving sobs that left her dehydrated and irritated and furious. She hadn’t known where to find water, so she’d bent some out of the air to wash tears and the taste of his kisses away. In the morning, she found a silver pitcher, wet with condensation from melted ice, with thin slivers of mango floating in the clear liquid for flavor.

She was prepared to hate him for his complete disregard, except in the morning he brought her a steaming cup of camel-yak milk, a tradition older than her tribe, and they’d shared it as the sun rose, each lifting the goblet in turn to the other’s lips.

She could not hate him after that.

And after the first time, close to half a year elapsed before he so much as brushed his lips against her own. Although they were wed, and ostensibly shared the same chambers, he kept strictly to his own rooms, and kept his own hours and his own company, busy with the intricacies of empire. And she was equally occupied, learning the old language of the Court, and the names and faces and ranks and positions and duties and heritages and histories and alliances and grudges and enmities and lusts and pressure points of the entitled men and women who thronged the Fire Lord’s court, and advised him on his decisions, and made her life one continuous labor of agony.

She had no one to stand as a bulwark against the sideways glances and snide comments of the Court. The Fire Lord’s uncle was only infrequently present; he spent most of his time pacifying the rebels in the countryside, and had little time for lonely girls, although when he was in attendance, he treated her with great kindness, and asked courteously after her health. Even if she knew he was chiefly interested in the production of Zuko’s child, she appreciated the way the old man met her eyes when he smiled at her, and the way his battle-scarred hands so carefully went about selecting jasmine leaves for tea.

Her maids were numerous, and their conversation always unfailingly polite. She could never point to one sentence or statement or even look and mark it as openly hostile, but she hated the way they moved around her. She might not speak their language of gestures and raised brows and half-slumped shoulders and open palms, she did understand it, and she knew that she was the butt of every unspoken joke, and the source of every ill-concealed titter.

Her tutors too distressed her. Jeong-Jeong, the Fire Lord’s War Counselor and her lecturer on Fire Nation history, and Piandao, the Defense Counselor and her lecturer on Fire Nation politics, were consistently kind to her. They praised her slow progress and her sloppy calligraphy and her mediocre recitation of names, dates, and deeds. Her language tutor often lamented the passage of the old days, when it was permitted to strike pupils with cudgels, and her etiquette tutor was often so horrified at her ill manners that she dismissed Katara.

She was the Fire Lady, yet she spent her days feeling like an unaccomplished and somewhat slow child. She had seen nineteen winters, and yet she might as well have been an infant, for all she was capable of understanding or accomplishing. 

As the months passed, the whispers around her swirled into loud-voiced speculation. Her stomach remained flat. She remained unpregnant.

The Fire Lord remained entirely disinterested in altering that fact.

She wrote letters to her brother, to her grandmother, and to all the nobles with whom it was her consummate duty and pleasure to converse.

The temptation to beg Zuko to annul their marriage always struck her most strongly when the moon was new, and her power was weak, and her mind was turned longingly towards her people.

She was raised the daughter of a Water Tribe chief, born during the longest war the world had ever known. She was the last bender of her people, she crossed the world on foot and ship, alone except for her brother, to receive training in her skill from the Northern Water Tribe, after her father had been lost at sea, and her tribe had fractured. She had splintered a warship with only the strength of her mind, and she had struck the first, and greatest, bargain in Zuko’s gamble for peace. She had wed him willingly, she had accepted exile from her people, and she had chosen to be consumed by his.

But home was her grandmother’s wrinkled hands, and Sokka’s brash jesting, and her drowned father’s sea-deep eyes. Home was no longer a place she could return to, and she mourned its loss. 

Zuko found her crying in the gardens six months into their marriage. She’d simply wanted to be alone, to feel inadequate and useless and hated in peace. She’d just been scolded by her rhetoric tutor for her inability to memorize an old speech, and in the same hour, her fine arts instructor had demanded to know why she had not yet completed a summary of the fourteen most commonly performed plays by the Old Masters. Her etiquette tutor once again dismissed her early because she had misremembered Lord Ukano’s name and rank, and had bitterly offended him by failing to offer him a bow of the appropriate depth and duration. The palace physician, when she had visited him for her monthly examination, had shaken his old, wooly head with ponderous severity, and said,

“It appears, Fire Lady, that your body remains steadfastly opposed to producing an heir for the Fire Lord. I will recommend to him certain positions adjudged more likely to promote conception.”

So she had taken herself to her private gardens after supper, and she’d peeled the stiff leather sandals from her feet, and she’d slumped to her knees before the pond thick with waterlilies, and she had allowed herself to cry.

She cried softly, so as not to startle the family of turtleducks that were currently foraging for food along the far edge of the lilies. 

The Fire Lord, whom she had not seen for a fortnight at least, had come upon her not ten minutes later. She’d sat up, wiping her eyes with one hand and smoothing her hair with the other, but it was obvious what she’d been doing, and the Fire Lord had frozen.

“Um,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” she said, because she’d broken so many etiquette rules at that point that she might as well offend the Fire Lord.

“You’re crying,” he said. “Are you hurt? I can call the doctor-”

“I’ve already seen the doctor today,” she said. 

“Oh,” he said, and then, tentatively, uncertainly. “Are you sick?”

“I’m not pregnant,” she said.

“Um.” he said. 

“And I still don’t know the members of your court, and I can’t keep the fourteen distinct levels of etiquette straight, and all my tutors hate me because of how slow I am, and I haven’t been able to practice my bending in almost two weeks, and I just, I just-” she didn’t want to cry again, but she did anyway. 

The Fire Lord shuffled his feet, and bent down in the muck before the pond, muddying his embroidered silk kaftan. He patted her shoulder in a simulacrum of consolation.

“There there,” he said, in a tone that she supposed was intended to be comforting.

He would have been so, so easy to hate, except he was always so unbearably earnest, and honest, and decent.

“Sorry,” she said, and he shook his head.

“I had no idea,” he said. “My mother-” he paused, and she saw him swallow. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” he said. “I’ll go, I just wanted to-” she saw he had a half loaf of bread in his hands, and she realized that he meant to feed the turtleducks.

“Stay,” she said. He shifted, so they were no longer touching. His hand on her shoulder was the first time another person had touched her in weeks.

“I don’t want to impose,” he said. His eyes shifted away from her face, down, towards the pond. The mother turtleduck and her six turtleducklings quacked happily from the other side of the pond, and slipped easily into the water, heading towards him.

“Can I feed them?” She asked. He broke the bread in half, and handed her the larger piece.

She crumbled the bread, and scattered the crumbs. The seven turtleducks squawked happily, and swam after her offering. The smallest of the hatchlings ducked under the water, and stole a piece of bread from its bigger sibling. Despite her tears, she felt a quavery smile threatening on her lips. 

“My mother hated it here,” he said, studiously avoiding looking at her. “She hated my father, and he deserved it.” He paused, and the mother turtleduck waddled over to him, and nipped at the bread in his hands. He picked her up, and held her in his arms, as though she were a laprabbit, and not a wild creature. She nuzzled into him, and ate from his hand. “I had no idea you were so unhappy.”

“I just-” she started, looking for words to describe the emotions that roiled within her. Zuko stroked the turtleduck, smoothing the green feathers around its eyes. Tentatively, she reached out her hand, a piece of bread in her open palm, and the bird snapped it up greedily. “I didn’t realize how difficult it would be.” He sighed, and he flexed his fingers. She saw a spark flickering on the tip of his fingernail, and she watched in wonder as it fluttered on the edge of flame, before extinguishing itself in the cool autumnal air. 

“Me neither,” he said, at length. “You know, I wasn’t supposed to be Fire Lord. My uncle had a son before he adopted me, to cut my father out of the line of succession.” He stroked the turtleduck, and Katara watched the turtleducklings scrabbling for nightcrawlers and mosquitohoppers on the surface of the pond. “Do you want to hold her?”

“I don’t think she’ll come to me,” Katara said. Zuko took her hand in his. Like all firebenders, he ran hot. He showed her how to touch the wild bird’s feathers, and she felt the strange transition from down to shell. The turtleduck preened into her touch, and met her gaze with a black, beady eye.

“When I was six a mother duck died while she was incubating her eggs,” he said. “So I begged Lu Ten to help me warm them. He showed me how to keep stones at a constant temperature by regulating the breath, and he sat with me for a full day, even though he was the crown prince’s son and he had duties and responsibilities, and we watched the eggs hatch, right around midnight. We made the servants dig up beetlegrubs and catch mosquitohoppers so we could feed them. This one’s the great granddaughter of one of the ones I raised.”

“Do all Fire Lord raise turtleducks?” She asked. He shook his head. The mother duck burrowed deeper into his arm.

“Can I do anything to make you happy?” He asked. 

“It’s really not so bad,” she said. “Sometimes I just miss home.”

He touched her shoulder, and she leaned into his warmth. The turtleduck, unaccustomed to sharing, quacked indignantly, ruffled her feathers, and fluttering off in search of her brood. 

Zuko opened his arms to embrace her, and she allowed herself to accept what he was offering.

She’s still not quite sure how they found themselves kissing, except that maybe they were both desperately lonely, and it seemed easier to talk with actions rather than words. His lips lit a low fire in her stomach, and when he pulled away from her and looked at her with wide, questioning golden eyes, she felt desire flare within her.

“Do you want to-” he said, and she nodded, not trusting her ability to speak. “Okay,” he said.

The first time had been perfunctory, pleasant, but perfunctory. Custom had proscribed their actions, and neither had had much of a choice. They’d been semi-drunk and semi-clothed and entirely desperate to avoid thinking too much about their situation.

They had made a choice the second time, situating themselves on the white snowdrift of the Fire Lord’s bed. He had an after dinner meeting with the metalworkers guild, she knew, because she’d earlier failed to recognize the guildmaster’s name and occupation. She’d spent the afternoon memorizing facts about those whom she would be expected to greet.

Neither of them seemed particularly interested in this agenda. 

She allowed him to undress her, peeling her out of her zardozi gown, covered in ornate gold and silver flowers. In all the years before she had become Fire Lady, she’d never seen anyone except for Chieftain Arnook who possessed clothes even a fraction as lovely, and she had whole closets full of expensive imported fabrics, dyed purple and crimson and cut from cloth of gold.

He gazed at her body, and the evident admiration in his eyes silenced the admonishing voice in her head, the one that echoed her tutors in detailing her inadequacies. Still, even though he kissed her, he did not permit himself to touch her.

So she brought his hand to her breasts, and she arched into his touch. She could not help the sound that splintered her throat.

“Agni,” he whispered, hoarsely, and her stomach turned over in nervous anticipation. He ran his thumb over her erect nipples, and she touched him beneath the layered fabric of his kaftan, and found him already half-hard. “You’re sure?” He asked.

“I’m sure,” she responded, and he took her breast into his mouth, and she felt her toes curl around the jolt of pleasure that lanced through her.

And so they had lain together for the second time, and she’d felt her limbs loosen beneath his hesitant touch, and she’d felt her mind shed its worries the way a turtleduck sheds water. 

He’d held her afterwards, and smoothed her long, thick hair behind her ears, and said, so softly that she’d had to strain to hear him over the sound of her rapid heartbeat,

“We don’t have to, I hope you won’t think I’m being- I just want you to know, we can be friends, if you like.” She could tell just how much effort it had taken him to say the words, because even though they were both naked and sweaty and in the gleaming afterglow of passion, curled round each other, limbs tangled and strength flagging, he sounded so uncertain, so unsure.

Except for Sokka, she’d never really had a friend before.

It was hard to believe that the Fire Lord had killed his own father with a bolt of white lightning, when he could scarcely bring himself to offer friendship to a woman lying naked in his bed.

“I’d like that,” she said. She curled deeper into him, burying her face in the crook of his neck, and she’d listened to his heart hammering in his chest.

It amused her to hear how swiftly it beat, when she traced her fingers down his arms, or dragged her fingertips down his pectoral muscles.

When her hand dropped lower, and felt him, his heart sped so quickly she was half afraid it would beat out his chest.

And so they’d lain together for the third time, and unlike the first two, they’d drawn their pleasure out, taking time to layer touch on touch, each learning how best to rouse desire from the other, and he had taken her hand in his, and laced their fingers together, and he’d so tenderly touched her face with his burning hand, and he’d met her eyes as he eased into her.

And really, although she did not know it at the time, that had been the end of all her hopes for a friendship with him.

_____________________________________________________________________

Once he found out just how unhappy she was, he swept down on her tutors in his full Fire Lord regalia, and insisted that he be allowed to observe their instruction of his wife. She understood that she was missing something, because her tutors all froze in exactly the same way when he made his request, but she had no means of parsing the new servility in the bows they directed towards her, nor in the way they seemed suddenly intent on praising her calligraphy or the liquidity of her recitations or the content or her summaries. 

When she finished her most hated lesson with the master tsungi-horn player, her tutor was all but in tears, and the Fire Lord was fuming, even though no words had been exchanged.

“I’m so sorry, Katara,” he said, afterwards. “You know, if you’d said something I would have intervened sooner.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“You will always have a servant to whisper the names and titles of the nobility in your ear if necessary. I gave specific instructions that you were to be trained to help me manage international trade, since you indicated you had some familiarity with managing your tribe’s affairs with the Earth Kingdom. It appears that my instructions were systematically ignored.”

“Master Ongaku was almost in tears,” she said, and he frowned.

“We’ve made significant educational reforms in the two years since I- since I became Fire Lord. It’s my official educational philosophy that positive reinforcement alone is a suitable means of instruction. To see my wishes ignored, in my own court, with respect to my own wife, is distressing.”

So her life had changed. Her tutors focused less on the ancient grudges between feuding clans, and more on trade policy. She’d always had a head for mathematics, and she found that she was capable of holding imports and exports in her mind, and it helped that Zuko permitted her into his trade councils, where she was encouraged to speak her mind, and put her learning into practice. The Economic Counselor, a woman only ten years her senior, was so impressed by her quick mastery of the principals of desirable shortages and deadweight loss, that she her scrolls filled with numbers as well as economic philosophy, and she gained an ally and a friend in the same day.

And she circled ever closer to the Fire Lord himself. They saw each other more and more frequently, at meetings and luncheons and formal dinners and artistic events, and she was driven half mad by her inability to understand his moods. One day he would kiss her in the hallway after a council meeting, the next he would ask for her opinion and nod his head and refrain from meeting her eyes. 

He sat beside her to watch plays performed in their honor. He relieved her of the archaic necessity of enduring the old Court physician’s monthly examination. He let her name the turtleducklings, and she chose to call them after the six noble sons of Lady Tekina in Love Amongst the Dragons, which made him smile in a soft, gentle way that lit his whole face like the sun.

The winter months passed with planning and bright, glittering celebrations and fewer and fewer reports of rebellion in Ozai’s former strongholds and infrequent, searing kisses that left her bereft of breath and sense.

The slender green tendrils of her spirit flourish in the warmth he offers, and stretched themselves towards him, tangling round her heart and choking off all hope of friendship.

She cannot not meet his eyes when he touches her shoulder at breakfast, nor when he asks her to pass him the platter of star-shaped green fruits, nor when he asks after her health in the low, questioning voice that she knows means _is there still the chance of a child this month_ , for fear that he would read the emotions swirling in their blue depths.

He hands her a steaming square of sunbaked quarterbread, and she eats it with koalasheep cheese and palloxberry jam. His skin glows in the sunlight. Her heart skips a beat when he leans over to pour himself more mango water, and his shoulder brushes against her own.


	2. Chapter 2

Katara rubs her hand over her eyes, the Earth Kingdom numerals blurry from her long hours spent squinting at them. There’s a shortage, small but noticeable, of gold, and she’s been trying to suss out where exactly the money went missing. The import taxes are low, but they form a vital part of the Fire Nation budget, and even a half a percent loss every quarter raises problems for the palace’s operational expenditures.

“Leave it,” Zuko says, without looking up from his own scroll. “You’ve been fussing with the same set for nearly an hour, you won’t solve it tonight.”

“I just don’t understand where the shortage is slipping in,” she says. He murmurs agreement, engrossed in reports from the borderlands, and she stacks her calculations into careful piles, and marks her neatest set of numbers for review by the palace accountant.

She blinks, and the candles blur into a wheel of yellow flame before her, then straighten out. A headache is forming at the back of her temples, and she stands and shakes out her stiff arms.

“Do you want some wine?” She asks him.

“Hmm?” He asks, not listening. It’s the day before a feast day, which means no public or private council meetings tomorrow. In fact, for the first time in a month, neither of them has any official appointments on the docket, although they’ll be expected to walk the streets of the Caldera, and provide patronage to the shopkeepers in the city.

The first time she and Zuko had made the walk down to the harbor, she’d stared in horror as, at his nod, nearly a quarter of the entire month’s budget was spent on sweetmeats and flowers and gaudy baubles and useless ornaments. She’d had to have the principle of liquidity and marginal utility explained to her, but she’d quickly grasped the necessity of spending treasury money as a way to stimulate the local economy.

The budget was always tight as a result, since any accumulation of wealth meant a reduction in the amount of gold available for circulation, which drove up the worth of silver, which in turn made trade more difficult, which threatened the stability of the entire kingdom.

Since it’s a feast day, they can both afford to work later than normal. She pours herself a generous portion of the yellow wine she prefers, and she pours Zuko an equal amount of his bitter crimson vintage.

She sets it at his elbow, and he looks up at her, quickly. She has to glance away, because when his eyes meet hers, her stomach flops over, and her hands begin to shake.

“Thanks,” he says. 

“What news from the north?” She asks. He hands her the letter.

The Azulon Loyalists managed to seize a port town a month ago, and his uncle has been working to extricate them. The report is detailed, but his request is the request of every field general: more gold, more troops, more food.

“We don’t have any more,” she says.

“I know,” he says. He drinks deeply of his wine, and she doesn’t allow herself to watch the way the candlelight catches on his throat when he swallows. She doesn’t allow herself to notice the strand of hair that has come loose from his elaborate topknot, and is currently floating just above his eyes. He brushes it from his face absent-mindedly. She does not look.

“You could take Beifong’s loan,” she says. He sighs.

“I’d rather owe my firstborn to a dragon than owe Beifong anything.”

“Debt is often positive for a country.”

“Not when it’s debt to a Beifong.”

“Well you can’t fight a war without gold-”

“I know,” he says. “I know. I don’t want to think about it now.” He sets the paper aside, and he drinks again. The tension in his face does not ease.

It’s been a long winter, and the war is no closer to conclusion than it was at the season’s start. Her brother is pledged to send troops come spring. She’d hoped beyond hope that the conflict would be over by the time the terms of the alliance came due.

“Do you have the minutes from the trade union council?” He asks. She riffles through her papers, and hands him a sheaf of papers written in the scribal shorthand she still struggles to understand. He skims them quickly, annotates them in his own shorthand, and sets them aside for comparison with the Economic Minister’s.

Katara pretends to read over the latest of the proposed educational reforms, which would push back the starting age of mandatory service in the Junior Corp of the Fire Nation Army from twelve to sixteen.

Her mind isn’t with her. She can’t stop watching Zuko, watching him drink, watching his brow furrow and relax, watching the way he sits perfectly still. He doesn’t allow himself to fidget; his posture is always impeccable. He comports himself like an emperor.

She knows it’s not innate. She knows that if she were trained since age eleven to assume the mantle of Fire Lord, she too would appear to fulfill her role effortlessly.

Still, she can’t help but be jealous of the way his power lies easily around his shoulders, and drapes him in majesty.

She dropped her cutlery at a state dinner last week, and then bent to pick it up, and overturned a goblet of wine onto the State Minister of Igni Fallow, ruining his fine silk shalvar. 

Zuko hides a yawn behind his hand, and Katara’s heart clenches. Her sympathetic yawn makes her realize just how tired she is. 

“You don’t have to stay,” he says. “I’m not near done. Just go to bed.”

Her protest rises in her throat, and perishes. She stands, and touches his shoulder in a friendly gesture of concern.

“Make sure you get some sleep,” she says. Zuko smiles at her, a quick flash of teeth and gleaming yellow eyes. 

She wants to say, “I’ll wait up for you.” Or, maybe, if she’s to embrace her role as his help-meet and subordinate, “Wake me when you come in.” But even if they do infrequently (more and more infrequently, these days) lie together, she and Zuko are friends first, and friends don’t say those kinds of things to each other, even if they are friends who are required to produce a child.

“Goodnight, Katara,” he says. His smile is lopsided, his eyes warm. Her stomach flops over uncomfortably, and she drops her eyes from his.

“Night, Zuko.”

___________________________________________________________________

As it happens, he does wake her when he comes in, but only because she didn’t manage to make it to her bed. His light footsteps rouse her from her spot beside the burnt-down fire, and she sees she’s ripped the scroll she was reading earlier. One half of Love Amongst the Dragons lies to her left, the other to her right. She cringes inwardly. The scroll had been his mother’s. 

“I thought you were going to bed,” he says, softly. She yawns, and stretches, and hopes her breath doesn’t smell, and that the ornate embroidery of her robes hasn’t left any unattractive indents on her skin.

“I did too,” she says. “What watch is it?”

“Almost the second,” he says. 

“Zuko!” She exclaims. “That’s far too late. You should have finished two hours ago.”

“A Fire Lord’s work is never done,” he says, quoting his grandfather, no doubt. She rolls up the scroll, trying to hide the rip, which hopefully one of the palace librarians will be able to fix.

“Well,” she says. “I hope you’ll sleep in past sunrise.”

“I promise to try,” he says. Sometime over the course of the evening, more hair has come loose from his topknot, and it frames his face with delicate, gleaming black strands. She shivers. “Are you cold?” He asks.

“Just a little,” she says, even though her skin is flushed.

“If you’d like-” he begins, and falls silent. She can’t hear her thoughts over the sound of her heart hammering.

“If I’d like?”

“If you’re cold I don’t mind sharing,” he says, hurriedly. “Or I can build up the fire for you in your chambers.”

“Let’s just go to bed,” she says.

He dips his head, and he won’t meet her eye. Her fingers tremble as she strips herself out of her golden cloak and silver himation.

Her words bubble up in her stomach, up into her throat, and catch on her epiglottis. 

She slips beneath the white coverlet, and he extinguishes the four burning candles, and joins her.

She waits for him to kiss her, to draw her into him, to reach across the expanse of the white bed and touch her, but he remains on his side, away from her.

Is she so displeasing to him? Almost a year of marriage has elapsed, and still, he will not touch her except infrequently. 

She edges closer to him, to the warmth he exudes, and he opens his arms to embrace her. His body is firm beneath her splayed palm, and she rests her head on his shoulder.

“This okay?” She asks, because Zuko is strange about touching sometimes. Given the way his father treated him, it’s not surprising. She can see him by emberlight, dark and unreadable. He brings his other hand up to her shoulder, and he smoothes her loose hair back. Ordinarily, she sleeps with it tied back away from her face, but Zuko likes to touch her hair, and so she leaves it down for him.

She’d laugh at herself, if she wasn’t so desperate for him to look at her that she can’t look at herself without wondering how she looks to him.

“Yeah,” he says. His hand rests tentatively on her shoulder. She draws in a deep breath, and she commands herself to simply enjoy the warmth of his encircling arms. The words inside her rattle in her throat, and she leans into his touch, and she opens her mouth to speak.

“You can touch me, if you want,” she says, softly.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, running his fingers through her hair. “We don’t have to.”

Her stomach clenches, and she wants to pull away, to save face, to find some way of dampening the flash of embarrassment that is currently searing its way through her body. But his arm is pleasant on her shoulder, and his chest is warm beneath her head.

“Goodnight, Katara,” he says.

“Night, Zuko,” she says. She works very hard to keep her voice light and even, to hide her agony from shame’s fangs sunk deep into her heart.

He’s asleep almost instantly. She lies still, so as not to disturb him, until exhaustion claims her.

___________________________________________________________________

She dreams of him, a dream that leaves her wet and wanting, an ache between her legs and in her heart. He murmurs something in his sleep, something in the mountain-language she does not understand, the language that his mother spoke to him when he was a child, and he draws her more tightly into his chest.

She can feel him against her thigh. Her dream flashes through her mind, and desire sparks across her body. Her nerves prickle.

He doesn’t sleep enough as it is. She shifts away from him, and tries to will her eyes shut, and to ignore the way her body burns.

He’s gone when she wakes up again, of course. It’s perhaps an hour after dawn, and his side of the bed is cold. Her maids come tittering into the room, and open the curtains, and bathe her with sackcloth and lukewarm water, and arrange her hair in the decadent style long favored by the court of the Fire Nation. 

“The Fire Lord has requested your presence at a luncheon in the gardens, Fire Lady,” one of the maids says. Katara dips her head, and allows herself to be draped in a crimson peplos and a gold himation. Leather sandals are laced around her feet, and her robes are pinned with golden ornaments. 

She glances at herself in her silver hand-mirror. Her skin is dark, much, much darker than the pallid Fire Nation nobles, and her hair is brown and thick, not straight and shiny and black.

She looks like an outsider.

Her morning is open, although the matter of the missing gold weighs heavily on her mind. She takes herself for a walk through the gardens, and she looks at the early spring buds, a brighter green against the dull winter foliage. The first of the season’s yellow flowers have blossomed.

She composes a letter to her father in her head.

Hakoda would like the gardens, and the winter flowers, and the spring vibrancy. She wonders how he’d feel about the Fire Lord. Sokka’s taken to sending him letters about swordsmanship, which he never fails to respond to. She’s almost convinced her husband spends more time writing to her brother than he does talking to her.

She’s being morose and wretched. She has no cause to be unhappy. She knew when she agreed to marry him that theirs would not be a match made for love. He has been kind to her, he has proven again and again his willingness to forge peace from the rubble of the world after a century of war.

His rejection from the previous night still stings. Perhaps she is too foreign for him. Perhaps he dreams of a Fire Nation girl with glimmering gold eyes and straight, smooth black hair and a name drawn from some ancient play or poem.

If she didn’t love him it would be so, so much easier.

Eventually, she ensconces herself with the expenditure reports for the sixteen provinces for the past five years, and she allows her mind to skim over symbols and numbers and public services until the worry eating at her heart abates.

The hour for lunch comes, and she makes her way to the royal gardens, and finds a carpet embroidered with golden thread and ornamental flowers spread beneath a tegim tree about to bud. The weather is pleasant and warm, and a gentle breeze splays its many fingers across her body. Zuko turns at her approach, and he bows to her (fourth level: familial, formal). She responds in kind, and his lips quirk.

“I invited you,” he says. “So although we are wed, because my social station is higher than yours, and because you are my guest, you need to be in the sixth level.” 

She bows to him, deeper than before, her hands held in the appropriate ritual gesture.

“Perfect,” he says. He sits cross-legged on the carpet, and she mimics him, her back held straight and rigid, her posture formal. “I, uh, got these for you.” He offers her a bouquet of yellow flowers, the first of the season. It’s a serious breach of etiquette to pluck the flowers, she knows. Only the Fire Lord, in fact, is permitted to do so at all.

He could have sent his servants to the market to fetch her a bouquet. Instead, he selected each blossoms himself. Her heart twists further.

“They’re beautiful, Zuko,” she says. “Thank you.” He pours her thin yellow tea, and she pours a drop into the earth, a libation for his ancestors, before touching the steaming liquid to her lips. It’s sweet and musky, and she knows it’s very expensive.

The consumption of the Fire Palace is a public good, she reminds herself, sipping again.

“What time did you get up?” She asks.

“Dawn,” he says, sipping his own tea.

“Zuko!” she protests. “You need to sleep more; you’ll wear yourself ragged.”

“We get a ritual nap this afternoon,” he says. She rolls her eyes a moment before she realizes that he is, in fact, serious.

“A ritual nap?”

“It’s the sacred feast day of Fire Sage Organu, who wandered into the Spirit World while he slept and received special revelations. Everyone’s supposed to nap in his honor. Surely you know this?”

“No,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Well, you know it now,” he says. “When we awaken around dusk, we’ll go on a market walk, and then eat sauteed fish and drink rice liquor, and then go to bed early. I hated this holiday when I was a kid, but I’ve been looking forward to it for a month.”

“It was so nice not to work this morning,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. Three servants appear, bearing steaming plates of green herb kuku topped with walnuts and barberries, and although she’s starving, she waits, politely, silently, until Zuko places the first morsel in his mouth.

Her history primer described the Fire Lord as the world’s axis, around whom all living creatures turn. He’d scoffed when she brought the statement up.

“It’s excellent,” he says, and the servants bow (tenth level: superior, formal). 

She tastes the light dish, and it melts in her mouth. One good thing about being Fire Lady is that the food is always delicious.

She inhales her lunch, she drinks more of the expensive yellow tea, she cracks a walnut with her teeth and grins at the pleasant texture of its meat. Zuko peels a mango for her, and they share it, and she licks the sweet juice from her palm.

They talk about pleasantries in light voices, and she enjoys the sun’s warmth on her skin.

When the better part of an hour elapses, her mind turns towards the luxury of a nap, and he rises and takes her hand in his own, just as is proper, just as the watching servants would expect.

Heavy curtains have been drawn against the sun in his chambers, and he pulls his topknot from his hair and shakes his head, freeing his long locks. The urge to run her hands through it is surprisingly visceral. She peels off her himation, and finds him looking at her.

His earlier rejection stings her, but his present interest is blatant. It’s been weeks since he last touched her. 

“It’s a likely day for me,” she says, which is true. He shuts his eyes, and opens them again, and when he looks at her, his gaze is cool and disinterested.

“We don’t have to,” he says. “Don’t worry. It’s fine.” 

It’s not fine. She turns away from him to hide the prickle of tears in her eyes, and he collapses on top of his bed. She leaves him to nap in her own room.

It’s almost evening when she’s awakened by her maids. They wash her face and whiten it, they paint her lips and use kohl to outline her eyes, and they dress her in gold and crimson, the colors of the Fire Nation. 

She hasn’t worn anything blue since she married him.

The thought of him tightens up her chest. 

It’s not fair. Spirits, it’s not fair. She gave up her world for him, and he won’t even look at her. 

It would be one thing if she could hate him, but she can’t, she can’t. His wilting bouquet of yellow flowers taunt her.

She doesn’t look at him when he takes her arm in his, and they begin the procession down through the city.

He buys fruits and flowers and baubles and ornaments. He presents her with a pin for her hair, and a bolt of fine lace made in the mountains, and a half dozen other presents that she has no want or use for. She mentally tallies the cost of the outing, and rolls her mind over the missing gold.

By the ocean, the Fire Lord kneels in the sand, and she kneels beside him.

“Ancestral spirits, and hallowed Organu,” he murmurs. “Give me a child, the continuation of my house.”

Her blood rises, her shame and embarrassment and fury and love all tangling together. She drops his hand the second it is permitted to do so. He looks at her, his golden eyes wounded.

“That’s not how children happen!” She snaps at him, and she leaves him to talk shipping lanes with the harbormaster. Then, she discusses imports with the Trade Minister, and staggered taxes with the alderman of Fire Foundation City, and then, before someone else can summon her to listen to their words, she slips away to the beach, and she slips off her shoes, and she walks barefooted on the sand.

She dips her feet in the water that, somewhere far to the south and east, curls around her father’s bones.

She stills the sea with a gesture. The surface is glassy. She could simply walk home, if she wanted. It would be a long journey, but she could leave the Fire Nation behind. She could leave him.

She turns at the sound of footsteps, and she turns away from the Fire Lord.

“Are you okay?” He asks her. His voice is questioning, his tone uncertain.

“Leave me alone,” she says, brokenly, her voice cracking. She can feel the tears roiling within her, as violent as the sea is calm.

“I hate that you’re unhappy,” he says, so, so softly. 

“It’s not your fault,” she says.

“It is,” he says. “Katara, I know you did not want this, do not want this, but I promise you I won’t touch you again, not ever.” She laughs, a sad, bitter laugh that could just as easily be a sob.

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“I know you might not trust me, but I will swear it by every spirit; I won’t.”

“Am I that repulsive to you?” She asks, her voice wretched. 

“What? No. Why would you say that?” He sounds so genuinely confused that she glances up at him. His eyes are wide and pained. 

“Then why won’t you touch me?” She asks.

“I can’t hurt you,” he says. 

She turns to him. 

“I am in agony.”

“Do you want to go home?” He asks, softly. “We could say something went wrong - you got sick, or injured, or lost a child, I won’t keep you here, I can’t.” Her heart rends, her soul is flayed open, she wants to scream from the pain and the fury and the despair.

“Please, Zuko,” she begs.

“Anything.”

“Please,” she says. “Please, please-” all her pent up words come tumbling out, rising up her throat like bile, spilling across the warm yellow sand, running in rivulets down to the sea. “I think I love you.”

“What?” He asks, quietly. He sounds utterly dumbfounded, as disbelieving as if she’d said that she intended to grow wings and fly south for summer.

“I think I love you,” she says, shamefacedly. He brushes her loose hair over her shoulder, and he lifts her chin. She meets his eyes. He kisses her.

He wraps his arms around her. Her lips open to his tongue, he tastes the inside of her mouth, and she pulls herself flush against him, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck. He lifts her easily into his arms, and she’s consumed by warmth, warmth that wraps itself around her sides and slips into all her hollow spaces and fills her up. Surely, surely his kisses have some meaning behind them, some emotion, some purpose beyond duty. 

He presses a soft kiss to the spot just below her ear, and her skin prickles all the way down to her knees. He touches his tongue to the junction of neck and shoulder, and she can’t help the gasp that’s ripped from her lips.

“I think I will die if you don’t touch me,” she says. “I’ll shrivel up like a plant without sunlight.”

“Well we can’t have that.” he says. 

It’s a long walk up to the palace. They have to be courteous, they have to stop to bless children or accept obeisances from their parents; one merchant engages Zuko for a quarter hour on the merits of shrine cod over alor, but his hand never leaves hers, and his fingers trace little circles on her skin.

Her heart is giddy, her mind feels wine-drunk, even though she’s had barely a half cup of rice liquor. 

When he finally manages to free himself from the merchant’s garrulous tongue, he presses a kiss to her forehead. She can hear the horrified looks directed at them for his breach of protocol. It’s not permitted for them to display such blatant affection in public. 

She kisses him back. 

The walk up to the palace is long, but once there, it’s expected that they’ll go straight to bed, so none of his servants or advisors or guards hinder them with questions about budgets or meetings or meal plans. He bolts the door to his bedroom, and she pulls her hair free from its pin, her cheeks flushed. She reaches for the laces that bind his salwar, and he draws her himation from her body.

She can feel his rapid heartbeat beneath his skin. She gasps when he pulls her head back and kisses her, his tongue rough and probing. 

“I will dress you in silks of seven colors,” he says. She knows it’s a reference to something important, something culturally significant, but-

“I’d rather you undress me, actually.” He flushes a delicate red, and she laughs at the sight of his embarrassment.

“I can do that,” he says. He unwinds her peplos from her body, drawing the layered fabric back from her skin.

“I thought you hated me, or wanted another,” she admits.

“I thought you resented me. You never looked at me, I thought I hurt you, and I hated myself-”

“Oh Zuko,” she says, softly. “No, no.”

“It’s just, you’re so beautiful,” he says. “You’re as lovely as the night sky before dawn, your eyes are so blue, and you’re so good at numbers, while I can scarcely keep them straight in my head.”

“And you’re so regal and confident, I thought you despaired of me because I couldn’t master etiquette.”

“They’re just a bunch of pointless rules dreamed up by someone who had too much time on their hands,” he says. “I don’t care if anybody ever bows to me again, if only you kiss me.” 

So she kisses him. She presses her lips to his, she flicks her tongue inside his mouth, tasting him, she takes his hand in hers and she presses his open palm to her bared breast. 

“Agni, Katara,” he says. His voice is rough, but his touch is tender. “Agni.”

He tangles his fingers in her long, dark hair and he draws her towards him, the way the sun draws up a drop of dew just after dawn. She goes to him, she runs her hands down the length of his body, she feels the way his flesh burns under her touch. 

His breath ghosts across her skin, he latches his lips to her neck, and she wants him to bruise her, to mark her, to leave lasting proof of his touch so all her twittering maids can cease their askance glances. She gasps his name, and his arm curls round her possessively, and he slips her breast into his mouth. She feels the sharp edges of his teeth, pleasure almost to the point of pain, and she gasps again. 

“Sorry-“ he says, drawing back. She can see the fire in his eyes concealing itself behind a well-tended wall. 

She guides him to her other breast, and he laves her nipple with her tongue. 

No one told her. No one told her it could feel like this, should feel like this. Her grandmother spoke of duty, and Sokka begged her to think of what she would suffer. 

No one told her about the way her body could consume her mind, the way she could surrender wholly to pleasure and be happy doing so. 

“Zuko,” she gasps. 

“I won’t leave a mark,” he says, misunderstanding. 

“I want people to know that I’m yours,” she says. She’s not sure where she finds the words, but he presses his lips to her neck, and she moans at the sudden prickles that skitter across her skin and settle deep in her stomach. 

Her legs tremble, and, still kissing her, he eases her backwards into the bed. 

He sucks firmly at her pulse-point, and she jolts upwards, drawn towards the filament of pleasure beginning to coil between her legs. 

“You’re so sensitive,” he murmurs, and his whispered words raise the hair on her arms. 

“Only because you’re tormenting me,” she says. 

He slips his hand between her legs, and she whimpers when he presses his palm against her and draws an exploratory circle, agonizingly slow. 

“Zuko,” she says. “Please.” He flushes, his pale skin reddening, and she wonders if he liked it when she says his name. “Zuko,” she says, again. 

He reddens further. The speed of his fingers’ revolutions increases. 

She can see flashes of starlight behind her half-shut eyes, she can feel tension coiling in her stomach, wrapping around her like thread on a spindle, growing taut and tensioned beneath his touch.

Her heart is stuttering in her chest, her breath seizes in her throat. 

She reaches for him, and he undoes the drawstring on his saroual and allows the fabric to slip down his body.

She twines her legs around his waist, and his burning eyes meet hers as he slips into her.

She arches into him, and he bends to kiss her, and in the recesses of her mind, the matter of the missing gold solves itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I'm actually writing A Sea of Troubles, I swear.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to kashicanhaz for her extraordinary patience and gentle encouragement, without which I probably would not have written this chapter.

She has never woken in his arms. 

The duties of his office compel him to rise early and retire late. A full night abed is, for him, a far too infrequent luxury. More than once, she has found him curled round himself in his office in the early evening, a blot of ink staining his pale cheek, his head resting uneasily on reams of taxable imports or duty-exempt businesses or applications for royal permission to travel into or out of his borders.

He wears himself down. He is like the blacksmith who keeps a swift sharp sword, a noble heirloom of an ancient house, always razor-edged. Honed to a fine point, perpetually sharp to the point of drawing blood, it makes a fine weapon, but its very excellence means it is day by day worn away to nothingness.

But when, the following morning, the bright light of sunrise drags her eyes open unwillingly, she finds her legs tangled with his, and her head resting on his bare chest. He’s still asleep.

The perennial dark bruises beneath his eyes are less prominent in the mellow glow of dawn. His long hair fans out across his pillow, gleaming darkly in the pink light, and his usual stern countenance is relaxed into what she imagines is natural amiability.

She thinks of how he kissed her the previous evening, and her heart takes a strange, stuttering half-step in her chest. He loves her, he wants her, he’s been tormented about her just as much as she’s been tormented about him.

He mutters something she does not understand, probably words in his mother’s dialect, his native tongue, and he presses her more closely against his body.

He will not sleep much longer, of course. Already the sun is rousing him, and soon it will cause the banked fire in his stomach to flare hotly, and he will awaken, and leave her lying in his bed, alone. But for a minute longer, or two, if she is lucky, she can watch the way his chest rises with his inhalation, and falls when he exhales, and she can feel the way his heart thrums steadily beneath his pectoral muscles, and she can remember the way his lips claimed hers, the way he moaned her name, low and gravelly, in his throat. 

She sees a golden glint peaking out beneath his eyelids, and knows that he is awake.

“Morning,” she murmurs. 

“Morning,” he responds, voice low and sleep-sodden. She expects him to spring out of bed once he realizes the lateness of the hour, but then she shifts and brushes against his cock, and a bright frisson of lust pierces her stomach, and she does not miss the way his eyes darken instantly. He does not move, except to brush a strand of her long hair behind her ear.

“I think you missed a meeting,” she says, and she looks at his lips because she cannot look at his eyes without her stomach falling through her feet. She has kissed them to swollenness, and she wants nothing more than to kiss them to bruises.

“Oh, two or three by now, I would imagine,” he says. Still he makes no motion to sit up, and his down from her ear to her neck, then across the swell of her breasts. His gaze is even, almost disinterested, but she knows him. She knows how he hides his thoughts beneath his golden eyes. Her skin prickles where his fingers touch. She will hate him if he leaves her like this, yearning for him without fulfillment. She has wanted him too long already.

“Zuko,” she says, and she’s ashamed by the pleading note in her voice.

“It’s unfortunate we ate underdone crabcakes last night,” he says, idly. His fingertips spark against her skin, and she would be humiliated by the immediate jolt of arousal between her legs if she weren’t so desperate for him. “A Fire Lady can so rarely afford to be sick, let alone the Fire Lord, but when these things happen there’s nothing for it except recuperation.”

“They’ll know you’re lying,” she protests. He presses a feather-soft kiss to her neck, and the prickle of day-old, unshorn stubble sends tingles all the way down to her toes.

“Probably,” he says, and kisses her again. “I suppose I could tell them the truth. My beautiful wife is naked in my arms, and I want to lie with her more than I want to discuss tariffs or grain shortages.” She flushes, and he laughs at the color that flares up her dark skin and fades into her hairline. “What do you think?”

“They’ll say I’m a bad influence,” she says, and he drops his head to bite, gently, at her nipple. She gasps, and she’s aware, suddenly, of the silence of the room except for the rustling of the bed beneath them, and of the way the light filters in through the curtain, and of the way he’s looking at her as though he wants to swallow her. A chill snakes through her spine and seats itself low in her stomach. He looks at her, his gold eyes burning, and he takes her breast into his mouth, and drags his tongue almost leisurely across her nipple.

Want rends her innards to ribbons of red flesh and crimson blood. She has to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

“Maybe you are,” he says, lifting his head from her breast. The loss of contact startles her, her fingers curl to claws and she digs them into the soft cotton of the white sheets to keep from protesting. He kisses her neck, and she cannot help the soft whine that slips between her teeth. “Or maybe I am.”

“Please,” she says. A smile flickers across his face and settles itself right behind his eyes. He looks at her, and the coil of lust in her stomach coils inwards on itself. 

“Please what?”

“I want-” she starts. His long hair is dark and beautiful, it frames his golden skin, he seems to glow. What she feels to him is obviously wrong, no person should feel like she does towards another. It’s inhuman how much she desires him. Aren’t women supposed to be chaste, to be sedate, to bear their husbands’ lusts with equanimity? What would he think of her, if he knew?

She’s heard all the jokes at her expense about the _appetites_ of the women of the Southern Water Tribe. She knows how she and her people are ridiculed as animals driven purely by lusts of the flesh. What will he think of her if she proves such slander true?

“What do you want?” He asks. His voice is in the liminal space between amusement and curiosity and lust. She has a calligraphy lesson she’s already certain to be late for, and she’s sitting in on the petty council to hear about a certain Earth Kingdom sea-captain's tariff evasion after that. She hadn’t even needed Zuko to grant her permission to observe, she’d been asked by the wharfmaster, who liked her knowledge of ships almost as much as her knowledge of tides. “Katara,” he says, softly. “You’re not supposed to think in bed.”

She surges upwards, wraps her arms around his neck, and kisses him. He yields instantly to her, he draws her to him, he kisses her just as he had the previous night, with as much ardor.

“I want you,” she whispers, softly enough that she could deny it if needed, softly enough that her confession could simply be a breath of air, if he takes offense.

“You have me,” he says, gently, and he covers her body with his own.

______________________________

She knows without him saying anything that this morning is special, that he most likely will not allow himself another such lapse of duty for months, or perhaps even years. In all the time she has been married to him, she has never known him to be careless of his role as Fire Lord, so although an inferno is swirling beneath her skin, although she wants him, she bites her lip and allows him to draw her slowly, slowly, slowly towards his pleasure and hers.

His touch is almost worshipful. He trails his lips across the dark valleys of her skin, as though he wants to catalogue every hair and scar and artery. He whispers praise across her skin, and it is the devotion of his words as much as the heat of his breath that sets her stomach simmering.

She can forget, as he presses open-mouthed kisses against the inside of her thighs, that his nation is currently tearing itself apart in civil war. She can forget, as he shrugs her thighs over his shoulder, and leaves teasing kisses around her core, that very soon, her people will be called upon to fulfill the terms of an alliance she herself created. She can forget, as he slips his fingers inside her circles his tongue around her center, how lonesome she has been within his city.

Her whole body is trembling with the kind of euphoria she could not have previously imagined. He wants her. He wants her. He wants her, and she has him, and his mouth is so sweet between her legs. Her vision stars and her head rocks back and the coil of pleasure snaps, and every nerve in her body flares with the power of her release.

She draws him up her body, and when he hesitates above her lips, she kisses him. She can taste herself on his tongue, musky and strangely alien.

The sunlight has shifted, it is now long past dawn, but no one has come to disturb them. She runs her fingers along his chest, and feels his muscles flex beneath her touch. 

“Can I taste you?” she asks.

“You don’t have to,” he says, but his eyes go instantly cool, which means that he is aiming for stoicism. She wonders how to best break the bit he uses to curb his desire. He is too practiced in abnegation.

“Will you think poorly of me if I say I want to?” She asks.

“Spirits, no,” he says. “Katara-” She ignores the way her name on his lips makes her feel, and she presses against his side so he will turn over, and allow her to lie atop him. She presses an experimental kiss to his clavicle. She has less control over herself than he does, she can only kiss the broad of expanse of his chest so long before she turns her attention to the stripe of dark hair that trails from his navel to the juncture of his thighs.

She follows it as slowly as she is able, and she is forced to admit that his self-mastery is admirable. He lies stone-still beneath her ministrations, and only the occasional rough gasp of air is enough to indicate that he feels anything at all.

Briefly, she wonders if anyone has done this to him before, but she puts the thought from her mind. He has not discussed his prior experiences with her, but it is evident that he has done far more than she. It will not do to dwell on what she cannot change.

So she brings herself to his cock, red-veined and thick against his stomach. She presses a kiss to the weeping tip, and she sees with a surge of satisfaction that he is digging his nails into his palms. 

“Katara,” he says, and her name on his lips emboldens her to open her mouth and draw him in as deeply as she can. He tastes slightly of salt and musk, and she finds it not unpleasant, but she is driven onwards by the way every muscle in his body tenses in an effort to hold still for her. 

She cannot fit him all into her mouth, not angled as she is, so she makes do with her hands, and she sets about trying to replicate the slow, steady pace he had used to pleasure her.

“Please, Katara,” he says, and his voice breaks even as he speaks. A thrill of excitement flares through her body, and she flicks her tongue over the ridges of his cock, and feels him shudder beneath her touch.

She does not quite have his discipline. He was seemingly unaffected by her gasps, but she cannot ignore them, she searches them out, and she learns that he likes it when she laves him with her tongue, and when she tightens her cheeks around him. She cannot deny him, and so, far more quickly than she intended, she feels him tightening beneath her open palm, and then he is pushing her away.

“I want to be inside you,” he says. She thinks perhaps he is unwilling to spend in her mouth, but that is a discussion for another day. She nods, and slowly enough for him to tell her off, for him to flip their positions and take her as a man is supposed to take a woman, she lines her entrance up with him, and she sinks onto him.

Her body has to stretch differently than she is used to to accommodate him. He groans, and she would walk barefooted over the Si Wong Desert to hear him make that sound again. He tangles one hand in her hair, and brings the other to her breast (he likes her breasts, she realizes, and the thought all but makes her giddy), and she gives an experimental tilt of her hips. She’s surprised at the marrow-deep jolt of pleasure that rocks through her, a feeling so instantly intense that before she means to, she is moving again.

She bends down and kisses him, and he slips his fingers in between her legs, and she rotates her hips again, and again, and again, moving over him, and watching his golden eyes grow gradually darker and darker.

________________________________

He spends within her rather quickly, and she slips from him into his arms, where he presses languid kisses to her hairline.

“I can't believe we could have been doing this for months.”

“We’ll have to make up for lost time,” she suggests, and he hums in agreement. “Were you serious about spending the day with me?” He grins at her, eyes glinting in mischief.

“It’s already the third hour of the day, maybe later. We may as well be absolutely, shamelessly slothful and waste the rest of it.”

“I’d hardly call you slothful,” she says, and he laughs. She can hear his amusement echoing in his chest, and she presses more closely to him. She waits for him to release her, but he does not seem to mind the way she clings to him, because he shifts so she can lie half atop him. “Besides, remember the missing gold?”

“Are you going to talk mathematics to me while naked in my arms?” He protests.

“Given how much you hate it, this way you may actually listen,” she says, and he snorts and presses warm lips to her nose.

“I suppose I’m familiar with the problem.”

“I think someone is embezzling it,” she says. “Because it’s disappearing from a half a hundred different sources, in small increments, so it’s got to be someone who has access to all the account books. No one would have noticed if the accountant hadn’t performed an-”

“Katara,” he says, his voice soft. “I could listen to you for hours, and I promise that I will tomorrow. But if you're going to try and make me think about my problems, I will be compelled to turn your mind to more interesting matters.”

“Like what?” She asks, only half teasing.

He skims his fingertips over her breasts, and she again feels the absurd sensation of joy, joy that he finds her body pleasing, that he wants to touch her, that he wants her in the same way she wants him. 

“You make a convincing argument,” she concedes. She lies with half her body draped over his, and he simply touches her, measures her with his palms, memorizes her. He braids her hair back from her face with deft fingers, and when, under his gentle explorations, she feels her eyes start to close, he curls around her and they doze.

When they wake, she knows, his touches will have want behind them, and she will give in to the coiled snake of lust that slumbers in her stomach, and she will let him have her however he wants. But for now, falling asleep in his arms, listening to the steady sound of his breath, she is perfectly content. 


	4. Chapter 4

She is no stranger to hunger. Growing up, meat was a rarity, and summer grains were difficult to come by. She spent the first fourteen years of her life suffering privation, until she and her brother forsook their homeland and made the long journey by sea to the North.

Even so, her hunger for her husband astonishes her.

It is not enough to have him in the dark hours before dawn, when the royal palace sleeps around them. She needs the flash of his gleaming golden eyes to arrest her from across the half-moon of his council table. She needs the touch of his hand in passing to set sparks skimming down her spine. She needs the slight tilt of his head before he makes an almost-joke; she needs the the warm squeeze of his hand that he unfailingly gives her when he lifts her from her bow to him, she needs the half-raise of his eyebrow when one of his counselors says something idiotic. She needs him.

She can’t even eat when she dines with him. She is distracted by the way he allows himself to savor the light quarterbread and fresh fruit that are the staple of the Fire Nation's morning meal. (He breaks his fasts with her now; he comes to her clad in the dark crimson and bright gold of his office, and he sits beside her as the sun rises, and she is permitted to watch the light of heaven touch his skin. She no longer finds it so agonizing to awaken early.) She doesn’t want food, she only wants him to relax his formal posture and sweep her into his arms and kiss her senseless. It is a hunger no quantity of food will sate.

“Are you feeling alright?” He asks. He is sitting gracefully in seiza, a cup of steaming matcha in his hands. They are in the royal gardens, on a carpet of soft moss, and the warm sun of early summer filters through the budding leaves of the strawberry tree. Last year’s fruits gleam on the branches, yellow and red, the colors of the Fire Nation. They are almost ready for harvest. 

“I’m fine,” she says. She cannot look at him without her heart trembling in her breast. The wind shakes the snowdrop-shaped flowers of the strawberry tree above her. 

“You should eat something,” he says, and he hands her an unleavened, steaming loaf of quarterbread, and he piles it with fresh fruit, and he spoons a healthy dollop of red-gold honey, inset with floating flakes of comb, over it. His fingers brush against hers; she flushes. “Unless you’re feeling nauseous.” His voice is even, but she can hear the question behind it. She shakes her head, and he drops his eyes. They have been married almost a full year, and for six moons, more or less, they have lain together. She is young, and he is young, and they are both healthy. Still, she has not conceived. 

She eats the food, and finds it sweet. The golden honeycomb is pleasantly waxy in her mouth, and it spills golden honey over her teeth when she bites down. She would have given up her bending for a meal like this as a child. Wordlessly, he peels a mango for her, and in the rising sun of early summer, she enjoys the first fruits of the Fire Nation.

He watches her the way her father used to watch the sea.

“How are your lessons going?” He asks, and she smiles.

“Well,” she says. “More or less. Calligraphy and music are still painful, but I’m starting advanced mathematics, and enjoying it.”

“At least one of us does,” he says. Us sends a flicker of warmth to her cheeks.

“And I told the Lady Treasurer about my suspicions about the embezzled gold, and she’s assigned a couple accountants to look over the harbor taxes for a few years.”

“Thank you for figuring that out,” he says. “I find numbers absolutely miserable.”

“She said if you’d grant me permission to pursue royal certification, I could take the imperial exam in this fall or the next, and then I could directly requisition accounting books, and I wouldn’t have to rely on her accountants, who are already overworked.”

“Oh, of course,” he says, and she allows herself to smile. She hadn’t imagined that he would prohibit her, but still, his easy acquiescence warms her. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be an accountant, but if that’s your wish I certainly won’t stop you.”

“Thanks,” she says. He ducks his head, and for a moment he is not The Fire Lord, but instead the strange, shy boy whom she glimpses more and more frequently. 

“Whatever you want,” he says, and she knows he means it. He rises, abandoning the remnants of their meal, and she stands, and he pulls her to him, and presses his lips quickly against her own. She stretches upwards, into his touch, and for a few seconds, his lips move contrary to her own, his tongue seeks out the last drop of autumn honey lingering in her mouth, and she sinks into his touch. 

“I got a letter from your brother,” Zuko says, drawing away from her. “He says to tell you he officially misses you.”

“Has he been forced to mend his own laundry?” She asks, dryly, and Zuko pulls a (mercifully clean, at least) woolen stocking, moth worn, maintaining only the vague shape of a foot, from some pocket in his stately robes. The sock, or, more accurately, former sock has more holes than the porous cheeses favored by the mountain clans.

“Brothers are the worst,” Katara says, but she takes Sokka’s well-worn garment nonetheless. It’s a stupid little memento, but there’s nothing more Sokka-like in the whole world. Only her idiot brother would think to send the Fire Lord a sock to give to his wife as a joke. 

“I can only imagine,” Zuko says. His eyes are twinkling, and Katara wants him to kiss her again. “If you want I’m more than happy to arrange a shipment of woolen garments as a gift-”

“Oh, he’s just being a pain,” Katara says. “He’s got plenty of socks, and he knows how to darn them too, our dad made sure of that. I would like to send him some silk stockings though; he’d probably be amused.”

“Be careful if you go to the Caldera,” Zuko says. “There’s been some unrest. Nothing major, but enough to have the city patrol on edge. There’s a curfew now too, so be back before sundown.”

“What happened?”

“The city guard tried to arrest a fisherman’s boy for stealing and ended up beating him bloody, near as I can tell. We’re managing it, but the people are upset.” Katara’s face slips into a frown before she can help herself. She’s heard how the city guard talks about her, she’s felt how they watch her, she’s seen the crude graffiti about her relationship with the Fire Lord that they’ve made no effort to erase. She dislikes them on principle.

“Was he okay?” She asks. Zuko shrugs.

“He’ll live, probably. The guard have always been a touch too brutal for my tastes, but they keep order in the city, so I can’t fault them their excesses. Just keep your eyes open if you leave the palace complex.”

“Alright,” she says. Sokka wouldn’t let children be beaten by his warriors, she thinks, and she bites her lip to keep from saying so.

______________________________

After her budgeting meeting with the Lady Treasurer, and a few hours spent studying for the imperial accounting exam, she resolves to actually see the city. As always, she leaves the palace under guard, with four masked firebenders at her side, and an additional eight disguised as civilians. 

When she was a child, she and Sokka used to hide under the thick musk-moose skin on their parents’ bed to try and scare their father. Nestled up under fur almost a foot thick, she knew that if she breathed too deeply, she’d stifle herself and starve her lungs of oxygen. It’s a similar feeling, being blanketed by the imperial authority of her husband.

The thought comes to her, a single bright flash of realization, that she will never walk a market street alone again. She will, for the rest of her life, be merely an accessory to power, she will be the Fire Lady, she will never be more than her husband, she, the last bender of her people, the woman who might, if she had been born a generation earlier, have changed the course of the war for good.

Instead she has sold her body for peace. She has cast aside the cold winters and long nights of the south in exchange for the typhoons and humidity of the Fire Nation.

The people talk about her behind open palms when she passes them, although they are quick to bend their heads when her guards glance their way.

“The whore has left the palace,” she hears an old woman whisper from behind her stall. She sells kumquats and persimmons and ripe fruit from strawberry trees and spring nuts and lychees and half-peeled mangoes, around which a few flies are turning lazy circles. She must be half deaf to speak so loudly. Her husband, eyes shut against the afternoon sun, grunts in agreement.

Katara plasters a smile on her face, embraces the ice in her veins, and marches onwards. 

The market is somewhat emptier than normal, but apart from that, and the increased presence of the city guard, she sees no sign of the unrest. 

Still, she hears what is whispered. It’s like they think she is deaf, or else an ambulatory doll dressed up in a golden silk kandys her floral-embroidered zardozi gown. 

_Water Tribe scum. Water-witch. Slut. Alien. Outsider. Barbarian. Savage. Still not pregnant; she must be aborting His children. She’s all appetite. All eyes, all lust. What would His predecessors say? I pity Him, living with such an avaricious woman. The whore. Bet she spreads her legs for whoever asks. How is it possible for her to still be barren? Although if I were Him I couldn’t imagine lying with her either. She’s hideous. Such dark skin too. Her children won’t look Fire Nation. He should be rid of her. He should be rid of her. He should be rid of her._

She cannot differentiate between what she hears and what she imagines she hears. The whispers swirl in her wake like flames roused by a wild west wind. 

She takes a pair of rose-pink silk stockings from a vendor who looks at her with barely concealed disgust. She has no doubt the palace will be charged far more than they are worth, but Zuko has never said anything about her spending, except that she should spend more, to promote the liquidity of silver trade within the city.

Her gaze snags on a bolt of sheer blue fabric, finely enough woven that, even seven layers thick, it is translucent. 

She has not owned anything blue since she married Zuko. The common people wear clothes of varied colors, but in her role as Fire Lady, she is not permitted to stray from the royal red and gold.

Before she can think better of it, she seizes the blue silk. It is soft, light, and as she lifts it, she realizes that it is not one solid color, but rather a shimmering spectrum of blues, each of which catches and casts the sunlight individually. The cool wind blows in from the western harbor, and brushes its sixty fingers against her sweating skin.

“Lotus silk, Fire Lady,” the stallkeeper says. His tone is displeased. No doubt he would prefer if his precious fabrics were not manhandled by a savage. “A great luxury. I can offer you red or gold, or both interwoven.”

“It is a gift,” she says. “So that won’t be necessary, but thank you.” He bows to her, a touch too shallowly to be entirely decorous. Before Katara can say anything, the faceless guard on her right strikes the shopkeeper a firm blow in his stomach. He crumples. She gasps, and the man coughs weakly on the ground.

“The Fire Lady will be respected,” the guard says, in monotone.

Katara knows his voice. She’s heard him laugh about how tiring the Fire Lord must find her insatiable _appetite_. 

Fury surges through her.

“That was unnecessary,” she says. She offers her hand to the shopkeeeper, but he does not take it. She can feel the eyes of half the market on her, she can feel the summer sun beating down on her through the colorful striped awnings. The light bleeds through, colored by the fabric, and she stands bathed in red, the color of her dress, the color of the blood leaking from the man’s mouth.

“Fire Lady,” another of her guards says. “We should not linger.”

“I’m sorry,” she says to the shopkeeper. “The palace will pay double.”

“Fuck you, you fucking whore,” the man says. He spits blood at her, and a globule lands on her expensive dress. “Barbarian invader! Coming here, relying on firebenders, the sons of the Fire Nation, to beat innocent-” but the first guard strikes his mouth with the butt of his spear, once, twice, and the man’s words are lost in a cloud of blood and broken teeth.

“Stop!” She shrieks, but it is too late. The man lies bloody on the ground, groaning, and her guards are ushering her none too gently through the market. “Let go of me!” She demands, but their grip is firm. The market begins to roil in their wake. A woman ululates loudly, and someone lets loose a battlecry.

Katara is six again. The red-clad soldier draws his knife from his belt, and presses it gently, almost leisurely, into her mother’s eye. Her mother collapses against the snow, and a vicious sound tears out the man’s throat, somewhere between a snarl and a song, the warmusic of the Fire Nation, and her every hair bristles at the realization that-

“Come, Fire Lady!” One of her guards exclaims, and then she is ungracefully swept into the man’s arms and carried at a near run back to the palace.

Her breath won’t come to her, and there’s a strange sound in her ears that resolves gradually into a flood of sobs. Her cheeks are wet, and she tries to dry her hands on her skirt, but instead they come away dirtied by the shopkeeper’s bloody spittle.

She has to master herself. She draws in a deep breath, and feels every drop of water radiating around her. The humidity in the air, the tears on her cheeks, the blood filtering through her guards’ bodies. She stills herself, but she already knows the story that will be told. _The Fire Lady is no warrior, that’s for certain. She burst into tears at the sight of a few drops of blood, and because the people didn’t love her well enough. Fucking whore._

“Set me down,” she demands. She is ignored.

Mercifully, they quickly come to the palace, and once she is within the West Gate, it is shut behind her with a resounding clang, and then she is set on her feet and ushered to her rooms, with a maiden to attend her.

“Fire Lady!” The girl exclaims, her voice the perfect simulacrum of distress. “What happened, my lady?”

“I’ll discuss it with the Fire Lord first, Ty Lao,” she says, and she’s pleased with the way her voice turns frigid. “For now, draw me a bath.”

“Of course, Fire Lady!” The girl exclaims. Katara twists her hands, and realizes that somewhere along the way she has lost the translucent blue silk.

The urge to cry again is overwhelming; she has to turn away to manage herself. She breathes deeply. She doesn’t care, not truly, she just wanted a scrap of blue fabric, even if she isn’t permitted to wear it. Just to look at, and remember the way the chill winds of midwinter froze the very waves of the sea, froze wave on wave, and created a series of half-mirrors in which she could see herself reflected infinitely in the ice.

“Your bath is ready, Fire Lady!” Katara turns towards the simpering Ty Lao, and her eyes slip over the tub of steaming water. “Leave,” she says, and she’s aware even as she says it that the coldness in her tone will earn her the girl’s dislike. So what? They all hate her as it is. She all but tears her zarzoti kandys in her eagerness to escape it.

The copper tub stands on dragon feet, and she steps from the warm stone floor into the almost-boiling water. She cools it slightly, just enough so that she will not fry her nerves, and she sinks into her element.

In the North, they have vast glass aquaria in which captive fish swim, bumping their webbed fins against their prisons. Katara sinks beneath the surface and brushes her fingers against the copper.

It’s all but impossible for waterbenders to drown.

The thought twists through her viscera and has her clawing for the surface. She draws in a deep breath of moist summer air, and shuts her sea-blue eyes against the sight of her gold-ornamented washroom.

Below the water, she can half-imagine she hears the ocean roaring all around her.

Tonight she could escape the confines of the palace and hurry down to the harbor. She could still the sea with a single movement. She could simply walk home.

She hears Zuko’s light footsteps, and she releases a trail of silver bubbles from her nose. He calls her name. She does not answer. His pace quickens, he calls her name again, and she sinks further into the copper tub.

The fish in the Northern Water Tribe had the saddest eyes, like they couldn’t quite comprehend their separation from the ocean. She saw one once, a weird ice-flounder, bash its head against the glass till its skull burst and spilled pink brains into the enclosure. The carnivorous swarm of mosquitolings spun round it and still the weird ice-flounder went on battering itself to death.

Zuko reaches into the water and draws her up by her shoulders.

“Katara!” He exclaims. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Zuko,’ she says. Her voice is perfectly even. He should be proud of her, for how well she is managing herself. He has wet his royal robes in his haste. He will have to change.

Idly, she wonders if he’ll fuck her first. Probably, if she kisses him sweetly enough.

“I’ll sort this out,” he says. “The shopkeeper will be beaten for his offense against you, and from there, we’ll-”

“Your guard struck him unprovoked,” she says. “If anything you should beat him.”

“He called you a whore-” _What else do you call a woman who sells her body for money?_

“Only after he was struck. I don’t want you to punish him.”

“The Law is just, Katara. I am Agni’s light on earth, and you are my wife. An insult to you is an insult to God Himself.”

“Do whatever you want then,” she says, and she slips her wrist from his grasp.

“Katara,” he says, softly. “What happened to you?”

“Sometimes I'm reminded you’re the only member of your nation that doesn’t want to burn me alive,” she says. She expects him to protest, but instead, he kisses her forehead. His touch is so tender, his eyes wine-golden and wide with something that looks almost like fear. “Will you lie with me?” She asks, and she's ashamed at how desperate she sounds.

“I have to manage this before it turns any worse, my sweet,” he says. “I just needed to see that you were alright.” She swallows, and plasters a smile on her face, and tells herself that she cannot be weak without upsetting him.

“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I was just a little startled.”

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I’ve left a guard at the door; he’ll ensure you’re taken care of. I’m afraid I’ll be back late.”

She nods her head.

“Warm up the water before you go?” He smiles at her, a genuine, almost happy smile, and does as she asks. He makes it too hot, but she keeps her agony to herself. He is a firebender, he cannot know the difference a few degrees makes to those who do not hold embers in their stomachs.

He leaves her be.

She floats in the water until it turns lukewarm, and then, when she can no longer justify doing nothing, she rises and dresses herself in a simple kaftan over comfortable leggings, and she goes barefooted into the receiving hall of her chambers. Lieutenant Jee stands in the open doorway, facing outwards, his hands clasped at ease behind his back. She’s watched Zuko run through his bending forms often enough that she knows the old soldier is centering chi in his stomach, and preparing to loose fire from his fists.

“Good afternoon, Fire Lady,” he says, his voice kind.

“Afternoon, Lieutenant,” she says. “I have a pre-dinner meeting with my calligraphy tutor.”

“The Palace Master has closed the Cardinal Gates,” the guard says. “There will be no internal movement until the Fire Lord has resolved the situation with his ministers, Fire Lady.”

Katara sighs, and turns away from the man, towards the empty expanse of her chambers. She has her scroll of revenues from domestic trade for the past two years, at least. She can practice the kinds of complicated sums necessary to calculate which commodities should be taxed at what rates under what circumstances.

Her stomach trembles slightly in memory of Zuko’s kiss. It roils with the memory of the way the guard’s spearbutt struck the shopkeeper’s teeth from his mouth. He moved so quickly, so efficiently.

She sits down with her makework and shuffles through long columns of sums, but basic arithmetic stopped challenging her years ago, and she can practically perform the calculations in her head. She’s worked over the numbers before, under the guidance of her tutors and alone, and she knows the answers even as she strives for them.

It’s dull.

So she sets her work aside, and elects to write a letter instead.

_~~Dear Sokka~~ To The Chieftain of the Southern Water Tribe,_

_~~I miss you and Gran-Gran.~~ The Fire Nation’s rainy season is turning gradually into the dry, which means that, at long last, bright summer has spread his golden wings across the earth. The Fire Lord and I break our fast in the royal gardens, which are colored by a thousand flowers more delicate than any jewel. ~~I wish you could see them.~~ I am becoming more and more familiar with my role and my duties as Fire Lady, even though ~~I often feel like an outsider.~~_

_~~Zuko~~ The Fire Lord is very considerate. He-- _

She has no words for her brother. The rose stockings she had intended to send to him seem unbearably childish.

At some point, dinner is brought to her. She ignores the food, and drinks the wine. There’s only a single cup of her preferred vintage, but she swallows it in one long gulp, so her mind feels pleasantly numb until after sunset.

It’s a new moon, which means she feels even weaker than usual. She resolves to go to bed. 

She hasn’t slept without Zuko since each acknowledged their lust for the other. She slips her clammy fingers over her breasts and tries to approximate Zuko’s possessive touch, but it’s no good. She trails her fingers between her legs, and draws slow circles over her center.

She thinks of her husband, of the way his long, dark hair falls into her face when he bends down to kiss her. She thinks of the way his fingers feel inside her, of the way his cock feels, of the way he kisses her firmly enough to draw blood.

The shopkeeper’s blood dyed the grey flagstones of the market crimson. His spittle and phlegm and blood and shards of his front teeth all mingled when he coughed.

Her desire aborts itself, and comes slithering out between her legs like a miscarriage.

Her father would know what to do. (He would tell her to come home.)

Sometime after the first watch, Zuko comes in. He is almost silent. Instead of moving to the bedroom, he pours himself a glass of wine from the decanter in the drawing room. She hears the customary tingle of fine crystal, and she chides herself for forgetting about his liquor. She could have gotten drunk without any difficulty if she'd been smarter. She rises, intending to go to him, but she is arrested by the morose way he sits, cross-legged before the fire. He holds his wine in one hand, and he rests his face in the other. 

The flames flare with his exhalation. She watches him breathe for a full two minutes, admiring the lines of his body, the way the firelight gleams on his skin, and then, suddenly, violently, almost without warning, he tears his crown from his long hair and throws it across the room. The fire flares, and she steps backwards into the shadow of his bedchamber so he does not see her. 

He swirls the wine in his goblet contemplatively, and then swallows it in one long gulp, and he turns to face her.

“I’m sorry for waking you,” he says. His voice is strained; she cannot tell if it is from fury or distress or some combination of the two.

“You didn’t,” she says.

“You should go to bed,” he says. She stretches out her hand to touch him, and he flinches away, so she drops her arm, and tries to ignore the way her gelid blood fuses the vertebrae of her spine into a column of pure ice.

“What’s wrong?” She asks, softly.

“Just go to bed,” he says. She doesn’t move. “Is my authority so meaningless?” He demands. His voice is closer to fury than she has ever heard it. “Am I so impotent a Fire Lord that my even my own wife won’t obey me?”

“You’re not my Fire Lord, you’re my husband,” she says. He contemplates the inside of his empty goblet, and she waits. His silence must be intended to wear her down, but he has forgotten that she is a child of water. A single stream can wear away a mountain, if given enough time.

It’s close to a half an hour before he speaks.

“I wasn’t supposed to be Fire Lord,” he says. His tone is low, his voice seems close to quavering. “My cousin was always the heir, and unlike me he was good at it. He knew how to make people love him.” Her heart clenches uncomfortably. “He was actually a skilled bender. He fought in the war, and then he died. And my father killed my grandfather, and tried to send my mother away, and burned my face and killed her when I protested. In front of me.”

“Zuko-” she breathes. She knows the story, of course. Everyone does. But she has never heard him speak it.

“So my uncle adopted me. Raised me as his, even though he was grieving his son. He loved me, he taught me, and when I was old enough, I came to confront my father. He demanded an Agni Kai, and he tried to cast lightning at me, but my uncle had taught me to redirect it, so I killed him, and I became Fire Lord. But everyone knows I didn’t really win the fight. Not really. I cheated, even though there was no rule against what I did. Even in my own fucking palace they won’t fucking teach my wife what I want her to learn. They defy my educational reforms in front of my fucking nose. And at the front, one of my generals took the imperial banners across the river Po, and he razed a colonial village to the ground, and now there’s going to be a war with the Earth Kingdom unless I can fix it, and I can’t, because I’m not supposed to be Fire Lord, and I’m weak, and I’m going to destroy this country one way or another.”

“Come to bed, Zuko,” she says.

“Will you give me a child, Katara?” He asks. “Will you give me a son?”

“Yes,” she breathes. Maybe if she has his child his people will not hate her.

He’s rougher than she is accustomed to, but she couldn’t bear it if he were tender with her. She encourages him to bite bruises into her skin, to hold her wrists unmoving above her head, to snap his hips as he fucks her. She falls apart with his name on her lips, and she does not see the shopkeeper’s bloody face for a full four seconds afterwards.

It is only when he spends within her, and rolls off her, drawing her onto his chest, that she hears, from a great distance, the sound of a vast, furious crowd massed round the palace, and she understands that there is going to be trouble.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably my last update of 2020, so thank you all (so, so, so much) for reading, and commenting, and generally being a very kind and supportive audience while I wiffle-waffle about what colors Katara is and isn’t allowed to wear.
> 
> Come say hi to me on tumblr (I’m @ekphrastic), because I may post the 500 words I ended up cutting where Katara reflects on the difficulties of adjusting to a bimetallic currency after growing up in a trade economy. (I’m joking, promise.) But seriously, I’m bored when I’m not working, so I’d love to make new friends!
> 
> Also, Merry Christmas/Happy New Year/don’t catch the coronavirus/be of good cheer. See you all in 2021!

She watches her husband through lidded eyes in the dim half-light of the dawn. He dips a rag of torn-off sackcloth in a pitcher of cold water, and he rubs his skin vigorously, sloughing off his night sweat and the touch of her lips in equal measure. 

When he wets a cloth and cleans their mingled fluids from between her legs after their couplings, he is gentle, slow, he takes his time. In the dark hour before sunrise, he hastens through his task, his hands brusque and efficient on his skin. She has never known him to be tender with himself.

She’s reminded of the way a nursemaid tends a child that is not hers, a babe whom she does not love, while her own infant moans fitfully in his sleep.

He begins with his right arm, rubbing in small circles, first his fire-hardened shoulder, then his corded muscles, then his elbow, then his forearm, then his hand. He passes over each finger in turn, beginning with the smallest, and ending with his thumb. Methodically, he dips his cloth in water, wrings it out, and repeats with his left arm.

He washes his chest, moving the cloth down viciously over the flat plane where she had earlier laid a thousand kisses. She watches the way his muscles tense when he bends to clean his legs, starting from his toes and working upwards with steady strokes.

The scrape of sackcloth against skin stokes her pulse. She is eight again, and watching her father scrape hides clean, listening to the rough rasp of iron on flesh. The sound is almost the same. She has never seen Zuko in furs. She doubts he would know how to clean a camel-yak's hide and prepare it for winter, but she is momentarily desperate to wear the wife-cloak of a creature killed for her by her husband. She wants to take him south, to lie with him behind the thick walls of a winter igloo, to take him into her mouth and feel his hands twist painfully into her hair while all around them her tribe sleeps.

Perhaps someday, she will bring him home.

Zuko lays his cloth aside, and crosses, near-silently, to the lacquered black trunk against the wall. Its hinges open without protest, and he withdraws his gold-embroidered loincloth. The individual metal threads gleam in the fading moonlight, and she watches as he folds the cloth around his legs and belts it at his stomach. He pauses halfway through when a yawn almost rips him in two. His hands shake, and he leans for a moment against the solid lacquer chest, then he straightens and resumes his task.

He pulls a crimson undershirt on, made from silk thin enough that the moonlight could shine through. The shirt is embroidered with Agni’s name in the old language, the character stitched right over his heart. So then, he’s going to do something perilous, something he needs the spirit's protection for.

He slips into his shalwar, the trousers the same crimson as his undershirt, although the silk is thicker and more delicately woven. They are embroidered with the nine Houses of Heaven, the stars all in their idealized constellations, every star a single gleaming diamond.

She grew up starving, and he wears gems with more ease than her mother wore bone-carved beads in her hair. She reminds herself that no one in the Southern Water Tribe goes hungry, not any more. Her marriage provided her people with lucrative trading contracts; the Fire Nation is committed to purchasing as much ambergris and ivory and winter skins as her people can provide, and at very favorable rates too. (They pay in the bimetallic currency of the Fire Nation; her people have all but given up the old ways of skins and stones and sacred shells and vials of ambergris, even Sokka pays his soldiers with the standardized gold sozic now.)

He does not slip his feet into his gold-twined leather mojari, the ones he wears for ceremony, but instead he wraps them in felt and pulls on his hobnailed hunting boots, black and imposing. When he stands, he lifts his feet carefully and balances on his toes, to avoid waking her. He pulls a black and crimson kandys embroidered with a coiling dragon on over his undershirt and shalwar. He belts it closed with a golden kamarband on which is graven the calligraphic names of all his ancestors.

He combs his long, gleaming black hair, oils it, and twists it easily into his ceremonial topknot. Instead of the ordinary tripartite flame, he selects an elaborate dragon which breathes fire from its three-pronged tongue. 

He withdraws a hideous hunk of charcoal from a plain red lacquer box on his desk.

“Are you going to declare war?” She asks. He startles; he jerks upright and turns towards her.

“I didn't mean to disturb you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“Are we going to war?”’ She asks again. He does not answer. “Zuko,” she says. “I’m not a child, I know what the regalia mean. I know what it means for a Fire Lord to hold a lit coal in his palm. You can’t declare war without telling me, without discussing it with me. My brother is your ally, you can’t drag the Southern Water Tribe into conflicts without sending envoys to him.” 

“I don’t want to,” he says. Katara feels her blood chill, and beneath the chill, she feels fury.

“You don’t want to, but you hold the regalia in your hands.”

“It’s just tradition,” he says. “Because the general disobeyed my orders and crossed the Po without my permission, my soldiers are outside my borders, so I am a War Lord. I intend to recall them; I will make peace with the lord of the colony my general invaded, but for now, I have to dress like this.”

“What about the people?” She asks. He shifts the hunk of coal from one hand to another, and she sees that it has left black smudges on his hands.

“What about them?”

“I heard them last night-”

“Oh, I hope you weren’t frightened,” he says. “I gave the order to drive them off if they were still at the gates at dawn. My guards will smash a few skulls open, and drive them back into the outer city, and then we’ll spend a bit more money than normal at the June Market, and then everything will go back to normal. My uncle used to say that commoners respond only to beatings and bribes, and ideally both at the same time. Don’t worry about it.”

Her husband is robed for war, and she is naked. She knows in her deepest marrow that he will not listen to her. He will look upon her, still smeared with his seed, her hair mussed, her eyes sleep-sodden, and he will see a child who does not understand.

She was dandled on her father’s knee while he took council with the hundred chiefs of the south. She was not kept hidden away in the women’s quarters like some infantilized, useless Fire Nation lady. She crossed the world by sea and by land, with only her brother at her side, to receive training in her element. She is capable of understanding, and if she is not, then she is able to learn.

“I won’t worry,” she says, sweetly, and he presses his lips to hers.

“I was so concerned for you yesterday, Katara,” he says. 

“I can manage myself,” she says, gently. Even she cannot tell whether her words are a lie. 

“I know,” he says. “I am taking a war council this morning, so I will not break my fast with you, but I will miss you, and I’d like to take lunch with you, if you’re free.” He looks so hopeful, so young. She surges upwards, she presses her lips to his, she kisses him. “You’ll muss my robes,” he protests, but she knows he doesn’t care, because he kisses her back.

“Go by La’s light,” she says. He pauses, and looks at her, and he bends his head, not as a firebender would upon receiving a blessing in Agni’s name, but as a tribesman does when honored by the moon’s visage. She hadn’t known that he’d known. He leaves her lying naked on their bed, and she throws her arms out, and sighs aloud.

She is Hakoda’s daughter. She is Kya’s daughter. She can manage herself.

She stands, and she feels the liquid flower of her moon’s blood break over her legs.

Fuck.

It wasn’t that she thought she was pregnant, but it has been six months, more or less, since she and Zuko began lying together, and everything has been happening, and she had been a week late, anyway.

No matter. There is always next month, and they are both still young.

She works the silk-soft sea-sponge into her body, and she finds a plan half-formed in her mind.

_________________________

“I’m afraid I’m feeling terribly ill today, Ty Lao,” Katara says, reclining in her bed, her eyes shut.

“Oh dear, Fire Lady,” the girl says. “Shall I summon the Court Physician for you?”

“I appreciate your kindness,” she says, her voice weak. “But I’m certain that’s not necessary; it’s simply my flux.”

“What shall I do for you then, Fire Lady?”

“I believe I will spend the morning abed with my paperwork.” she says. “I’m to dine with the Fire Lord after midday, so come to dress me around noon, and until then, I will simply prepare for my examinations.”

“Of course, Fire Lady,” the girl says. She bends at the waist, and Katara wonders how it is possible for a bow to be so utterly devoid of submission. Her maiden leaves her alone, and she rises from her bed and dresses herself in the clothes she uses to practice bending.

She wears plain crimson trousers and an unadorned tunic over them; the fabric is fine and costly, but unless someone examines it, it will not instantly mark her as a woman of high status. Ordinarily, she would not leave the palace without a kalyptra to cover her hair and mark her as the Fire Lord’s wife, but the only kalyptrai she owns are marked with the royal insignia, and only noblewomen wear them, in any case. 

Her summer sandals of fine, woven leather are easy to bind around her feet.

She glances at herself in the silver, reflective mirror. Her hair is uncoiffed, her features, without their usual heavy makeup, unremarkable. She is darker in complexion than most of the Fire Nation, but the Caldera is a thriving port, and it is not uncommon for foreign women to make matches with the natives, especially among the merchant classes.

Her loose hair would, formerly, not have given her any pause, but she has not worn it uncovered since her marriage. As a girl raised on the white tundra of the south, born into war and famine, she could not have imagined that she would one day tremble to walk beneath the sun with her head bare.

But she does not intend to be discovered, in any event, and wearing a kalyptra will only serve to draw attention to her, which is the last thing she wants. What Zuko doesn’t know will not hurt him. Probably.

The Fire Lord’s chambers open onto private gardens, which are encircled by the great wall. It’s a simple enough matter for her to scale it; avoid the guards stationed at regular intervals, and make her way into the bustling center of palace activity.

The palace employs so many and so varied a number of staff that she easily blends into the swift rivers of staff. Her etiquette lessons come in useful; she knows enough to keep herself invisible. She walks, unchallenged, out the front gate of the palace she has not left without a guard since she first came to dwell in it.

Just as Zuko had predicted, the streets are empty of angry citizens, and the flow of traffic appears ordinary for a non-market day. However, Katara is aware of the additional guards that stand at rigid attention every ten paces or so, and she keeps her gaze lowered as she hastens down into the city proper. She’s lucky her profile hasn’t been cast into a coin yet, because otherwise she might be more readily recognized. Zuko’s Minister of Currency has been hinting that he’d love nothing more than to strike a brand new silver siglos with her and her husband in split profile.

Zuko has expressed his desire to wait for the birth of their child. He claims it's because there are already fourteen bicephalous coins in circulation, and a fifteenth would be excessive. There hasn’t been a coin with three royal personages struck since Lu Ten, heir to Iroh, heir to Azulon, was born, and there are only four others in circulation besides that one. She wonders, sometimes, if he’s worried he’ll debase the value of the silver siglos if he puts her face on it. 

What would her father think, if he knew his only daughter, the only bender of the Southern Water Tribe, was worried about what kind of coin her face was going to adorn? Would he be proud of her, having come so far? Would he be glad for her, she who starved in the dark polar winters, and never saw a metal more precious than iron, nor a material more costly than ambergris, until she traveled to the North?

There are times she thinks he would rejoice in her status as Fire Lady. She made the bargain; she sold herself; she struck the first and greatest blow for peace. That was more than her father, with all his stern warriors and swift cutters and iron weapons, ever managed. Surely he would not begrudge her these indulgences, nor the great luxuries of the Fire Nation? Surely he would be glad that the son of his daughter will someday sit the throne of his greatest enemy?

Most times she thinks he would not recognize her, robed in crimson and gold, her neck bruised by the Fire Lord’s kisses. Most times, she imagines that if her father were to sail into the Fire Lord’s Harbor, he would cut her down where she stood, and even in death he would not recognize her. 

She was eleven when he sailed away.  
  
Katara shakes the thoughts from her heads, and makes her way to the harbor market.

________________________

She isn’t sure what she expected to find in the city. Perhaps merchants with long daggers in their belts, or crowds of red-clad revolutionaries, or throngs of people fomenting their fury at the Fire Lord. But the market looks much the same as it did the day before, and there aren’t even royal guards stationed along the thoroughfare, just the ordinary city guards, and they are not more heavily armored than before.

She isn’t sure why she was convinced Zuko would be wrong. They’re his people, not hers. He understands them; she does not. Perhaps they like him to beat them bloody every once in a while; perhaps they like to be reminded of his godhead.

Her own people would never stand for what was done. If Hakoda had caused a merchant to be struck without justification, they would have demanded retribution, blood for blood, blow for blow, life for life.

But the silken awnings of the market are pleasantly speckled with the June sun, and there is no swelling tide of resentment, no frothing furor at the Fire Lord’s abuses. There is simply the market, just as always, and the call-and-response of the wharf merchants, and the throbbing hum of voices raised in bargain.

A procession of Fire Sages passes through the eastern gate, incense coiling out of golden censers, chanting a hymn in the old language. 

In the distance, a tsungi-horn announces a trade ship’s successful docking, and calls the unemployed to earn some coin by unloading it.

There’s nothing to see, she realizes. 

She walks back to the palace, and slips in amid the bustle of low-level functionaries arriving for their noon meetings, and she contemplates what color dress will best please Zuko. In her mind, she sees his easy acceptance of La’s blessing, and once more she recalls how sweetly he shared the steaming cup of camel-yak milk with her the morning after they were wed.

If he were not so tender, so kind, so unexpectedly open to her, he would be easier to understand.

Ty Lao comes to her, and dresses her in a purple gown of fine, dark silk, and drapes chains of gold over her shoulders and across her waist, then slips floral, gold-embroidered jutti over her feet. 

She covers her hair with a kalyptra of sheer gold spotted with purple flowers, and Katara glances at herself in the mirror.

She looks Fire Nation. She looks regal.

“The Fire Lord has asked lunch to be laid in the Women’s Gardens, Fire Lady,” Ty Lao says, her head bowed respectfully.

“Thank you, Ty Lao,” she says, and she goes to meet her husband.

He is reclining beneath a tegmin tree when she comes to him, a scroll of comparative taxes in his hands. He rises to greet her, and she bows to him (sixth level, familial, formal). He takes her hand in his.

“I was informed you were feeling ill,” he says. She avoids his gaze, certain he could read the falsehood in her eye if he wanted to.

“It’s just my flux,” she says. His face falls imperceptibly; his disappointment hurts her more than she expected.

“Perhaps you should see the Court Physician,” he says. She shakes her head.

“I’m fine,” she says. He flushes a painful red, and her heart twists at his discomfort.

“I meant about why we haven’t- why there isn’t a child-”

“It’s only been six months,” she says, cooly. He glances around the garden, but except for the turtleducks wallowing in the mud, they are alone.

“Katara,” he says, almost desperately. “Katara, I need a son.”

“I know,” she says. “I am aware, and I promised to bear you one-”

“There have been fourteen assassination attempts in the past month,” he says. His words are whisper soft, she feels her flesh chill.

“Zuko-” she says.

“I need an heir,” he says. She swallows.

“Fourteen?” She asks. He nods.

“I do not know- If something happens, my uncle will take you to my ancestral holding in the Black Cliffs; the people are loyal to me, and will love you as my wife. But I must have a son.”

“You did not tell me you were in danger,” she says. He shrugs his shoulders slightly, the glimmering regalia of his war robes shimmer in the sunlight.

“I thought it would get better,” he says. “But it has not. The Palace Master has asked me to consider dissolving the Imperial Court and relocating to a safer place.”

“It’s because of me, isn’t it?” She asks. He shakes his head.

“Only partially. The Azulon Loyalists don’t agree with the ceasefire; they feel I’ve neutered the Fire Nation’s ability to defend itself, and that all our shed blood has been sacrificed for nothing. You and I are only symbols of their anger.”

“What will you do?” He bites into a ripe strawberry, but she can tell it gives him no pleasure to eat.

“My Internal Minister has suggested I temporarily suspend my Beneficent Concessions and resume public punishment, not executions, not yet, just whippings, just enough to put the fear of the Crown back into the people. My Lady Treasurer has suggested a temporary respite of tariffs, to allow for the reaccumulation of wealth in the hands of the merchant class. My Minister of War wants me to call the armies home from the front and station soldiers in every street, and hang anyone who expresses dissatisfaction with the arrangement.” Zuko turns his gaze to her. “How was the city this morning?”

“How did you know?”

“Do you think I would leave my own wife unguarded?” He asks. “You must not lie to me, Katara. Whatever you want I will give to you, you need only ask. I will grant you your wish, even if it is half my kingdom.”

“Let me sit your war council then,” she says. He is silent for a long moment, he looks at her as though he intends to peel back her skin and memorize the way her veins are twined around her bones.

“Why?” His question is blunt, not the inquiry of a confused husband, but the interrogation of a great lord.

“My people are your allies,” she says. “Since the Southern Water Tribe has not yet selected an envoy, I deserve the right to speak on their behalf.”

“The Fire Lord’s war council is no place for women,” he says, glancing sideways, gauging her reaction.

“War affects all of us, Fire Lord,” she says. He bites his lip, and she fears for a moment that he will reject her.

“It shall be as you have asked,” he says. When she takes his hand in hers, his fingers are clammy. She understands that he is afraid.

“I am on your side, Zuko,” she says, earnestly. 

“I know,” he says. He kisses her hair, and a chill prickles down her spine. "I know. But I must ask, Katara, why did you sneak out of the palace?”

“I didn’t believe the people could be content after being so mistreated,” she says. “I thought they must be angry, and I wanted to know if I could do anything to ease their fury. But I was wrong, I think.”

“Yes,” he says. “My people are not like yours, I think. They are more willing to forgive their leaders.”

___________________________

The next market day comes a week later. Dressed in royal red and gold, made up with lead paint and dark kohl and red dye for her lips, clad in the wealth of the royal family, she and Zuko leave the East Gate and walk in splendor down to the market. The people turn out to watch them, some shout her husband’s name, but most simply come to see. 

The walk down to the harbor market is long, made longer by the extra checkpoints that have been established as a precaution. It is a June market, which means they will purchase fresh goods and green gems and exotic spices, and whatever takes the Fire Lord’s fancy.

Last market day, Zuko gave her purple ribbons for her hair, and an amethyst as big as her head, and a necklace of rubies strung on a chain of thick, soft gold. 

He had been almost speechless when she had draped herself in only the necklace, sprawled waiting for him on their marriage bed. He had marked her skin in his eagerness to have her, and although she was more than capable of erasing bruises with only the brush of her fingertips and the touch of clear water, she had allowed the blemishes first to blacken, then to purple, then to yellow, then to fade entirely from her skin.

She wonders what he will give to her this market day, and whether he will gift her bruises to match. He is ordinarily so gentle that his violence cannot help but rouse her blood.

They come to the harbor market. The royal trumpets sound, announcing the Fire Lord’s presence, and the assembled vendors pause in their tasks to kneel to their sovereign. 

Zuko walks to a fishmonger, and inspects his display of filleted sea-eels.

“I would be honored to dine on this fine catch,” he says. The fishmonger does not rise from his knees. “Merchant,” Zuko says. “I will purchase these eels from you.” The man remains in seiza, head bowed.

“Your Fire Lord has addressed you!” One of Zuko’s guards barks. The man remains motionless.

“I will pay you double,” Zuko says. Katara can feel the weight of every eye upon them, and she is suddenly, ridiculously grateful for the kalyptra that allows her to hide. The man does not rise. Zuko’s guard steps forward, prepared to strike him, and Zuko raises his hand to stop him. “What do you want for your eels?” He asks, softly. 

“Master,” the man says. “My lord is Agni Himself to me, I adore my lord, with all my heart. But my sons perished in my lord’s wars, and I have received no recompense. I love you, my lord, but my lord’s guards have wounded the men of my clan, and harmed the women of my blood. I cannot sell to the palace. I will not.” Katara feels her stomach collapse to her knees; she is suddenly terrified.

“We will confiscate your stock, old man-” a guard begins, and Zuko silences him with a glance.

“Peace,” he says. “I wish no one ill. If you choose to ignore the generosity of the palace, that is your own business. I will buy eels from another vendor.”

“Master,” the fishmonger says. “My lord will not find a man or woman willing to sell to the palace. We cannot, my lord, we are groaning, we are crying out under the indignities we have been subjected to. My lord-”

“Is this true?” Zuko demands. The merchants, kneeling, do not answer him.

Katara knows what he is going to do before he gives the command, and it is only by biting her cheek to blood that she keeps from speaking out against him.

“Seize everything,” he tells his guards. “Strip the merchants of their licenses to sell in the Fire Lord’s harbor, and drive them out.” He turns on his heel and stalks away, his hobnailed warboots sending sparks up in his wake. 

____________________

When he comes to her that night, and presses kisses on her shoulders, she pushes him away.

“You’ve started a war,” she says.

“I’ve ended one, Katara,” he says. “I cannot allow dissent in my own city.”

“They will not forgive you, Zuko,” she says. He moves to kiss her again, and she stops him. “I will not forgive you either,” she says. “Do not touch me, I could not bear it.” He gapes at her, shocked and wounded, and she feels bile rising in her throat. “Are you going to take what is not freely given, or will you go?” His jaw tightens, and he leaves her be.

Some time before dawn, the scent of fire awakens her. She glances out the wide window, and finds the city burning.


	6. Chapter 6

Ordinarily a Fire Nation husband and wife break their fasts together. Before her hearth, the center of the household, which is kept constantly burning in honor of Agni, the wife places a large stone sanded to smoothness, and she bakes loaves of fresh quarterbread from the dough that she prepares the night before. The husband cuts fruit. If the household is wealthy, he pares and cores and strips the seeds away, leaving only the succulent flesh behind. If the household is poor, then he gives his children and his wife the best parts, and contents himself with the rind, the skin, the bruised part, the half-rotten apple, the grapes gone sour in the sun.

Katara knows about this tradition from plays. The comedies of Meander are domestic, and his interest in verisimilitude means that he tries to represent, as accurately as possible, the lives of the commoners.

The Fire Lord and Fire Lady do not prepare their own breakfasts, of course. The quarterbread they eat is dusted in sugar powder from Gaoling, and sweetened with honey from Mhrn. Even out of season they dine on dragonfruit, and white-fleshed nectarines that taste like June in miniature, and grenadille that are full to bursting with black seeds and rich orange pulp. If they want it, there is meat, freshly butchered or left to ferment in vats of rich spices.

Growing up, Katara thought herself privileged when she was allowed to eat a palmful of bunchberries with her morning gruel.

But when Zuko comes to her at dawn, it is with a platter of fruit that she can tell he cut himself, and he is not crowned, and he wears only a light, informal tunic of fine woven muslin, simple, cream-colored, neutral. He is not the Fire Lord, dressed in such unornamented fabric. Even she, unfamiliar with all the symbolism of the Fire Nation, could not fail to understand his meaning.

The scent of smoke from the burning city sours the edges of the air. She turns away from him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry that I’ve angered you. I’m sorry that you would ever think that I- that I would hurt you. Please, Katara, let me make it up to you.”

He is young. He is only twenty three, how is it right, how is it just, that he was given mastery of millions of souls while still scarcely a man? He looks at her with such guilt and grief that the tendons in her heart crack. She is only twenty. How is it right, how is it just, that she has been stripped of home, family, and heritage so newly out of childhood? What have either of them every done to merit their positions?

Fourteen assassination attempts in the past month, he had said. One every two days, or near enough. What would become of her without him? What would happen to his country, to the world, if he died without an heir? (What would happen if there was no Fire Nation demanding a son from her womb? What if there was only her husband and the warm sun wringing blushes from her cheeks?)

She wishes she could hate him. She wishes she could reconcile the Fire Lord who ordered the wares of every merchant to be seized with Zuko, who stands before her in bare feet, and holds a peace offering in his hands.

She hates the Fire Lord. She is scared to put a word to what she feels for Zuko.

She stretches out her hand and takes a single grape from the silver platter. It is peeled, halved, stripped of seeds. He must have spent hours preparing all the fruit. She eats it, and the tension in his shoulders dissipates, somewhat.

“The city is burning,” she says. She almost flinches at how flat and cold her voice sounds.

“The Minister of the Caldera has already established a fire brigade; nothing too valuable has been damaged. We will find the arsonists and exact justice, and we will break up the mobs of subversives who-”

“Zuko,” she says, because Zuko will listen to her. The Fire Lord will not; has not; but Zuko wants to, and Zuko will. “You’ve tried punitive measures and they haven’t worked. Don’t you see, you’re only making it worse by being harsh.”

“My ministers say force is the only way to maintain order,” he says. She takes the platter of fruit from his hands, mangoes cut into delicate triangles, apples peeled and cored, oranges stripped of pulp and rind, grapes, pineapple, kiwano, starfruit, even lilyhips, and she sits cross-legged on the floor before her balcony and balances the platter on her lap.

He sits in seiza opposite her, and she knows from the way he looks at her from behind his dark curtain of hair that he will listen.

It’s strange how she knows him just by the way he holds his body. It’s strange how she can read intent in the curve of his neck.

Does he know her as she knows him? Can he read her anger and her fear in the way she tucks her feet beneath her robes? He must at least sense her hesitation, because he will not look at her head on. He’s treating her like one of his shy turtleducks, like he’s afraid she’s going to fly off and leave him standing alone in his garden.

She could, if she wanted to. She could still the sea and walk home. It’s what her father would want, it’s what Sokka would suggest, especially if he knew the danger the Fire Lord was in.

“I am an outsider,” she says. “I realize that I cannot understand the Fire Nation like your ministers, who have known it all their lives. But Zuko, husband, I grew up hungry and angry. I know what it’s like to feel rage swelling in my breast, swelling until it becomes a tumor that sucks away all other emotions, all other wants and needs and desires except a lust for vengeance. People are angry, Zuko, and they’re not going to become less angry if you punish them. They’re not going to become conciliatory if your guards beat them in the streets, if you permit your soldiers to steal from them. If you make them your enemy they will make you theirs. Zuko, husband, you know this. You know this.”

He is silent for a long moment, a full minute, then another. She eats a ring of pineapple, the hard center removed, the jagged edges cut to perfect, circular smoothness. It’s sweet and juicy, the taste of sunlight after an afternoon thunderstorm.

How long did he spend preparing the fruit? When last did he sleep more than six hours at a time, when last did he awaken and feel only lightness in his heart? He is only twenty three, what did he ever do to warrant the burden of a quarter of the world being placed on his shoulders? 

“What should I do, then?” He asks, his voice a whisper.

“Give back what you took, and pay for it too. Give the merchants back their licenses, declare a temporary amnesty, and don’t permit your guards to beat your people in the streets. Say you will arrange a summit, a meeting with some representatives of the guilds, and-”

“Katara, I am the blood of Agni,” he says. “I am the descendant of the Sun, I shouldn’t need to- to grovel before commoners.”

“Zuko,” she says. He looks at her; like always when he looks at her, he angles his face so his scar is shadowed by his hair. She wipes her hands, sticky with fruit juice, on her nightdress (the fabric alone is more costly than anything she owned as a child), and she moves towards him, and she puts out her hand, and she tucks his hair behind his left ear, so the sunlight strikes his scar. “We’re flesh, not spirits,” she says. “Same as anyone.”

“Katara,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “Katara, I don’t- I can’t- Katara, I’m the Fire Lord.”

“That’s just a title,” she says. “That’s not who you are. Who you are is Zuko.” He looks at her, really looks at her, with good eye and bad, scarred side and whole. She can see the way his gaze, liquid, fluid, glides over her, searching, contemplating, considering, calculating. His gaze brushes against hers, drops for a moment, and then he reaches out his hand and brushes his knuckles against her cheek.

“I have power,” he says, as though to assure himself of the fact.

“You won’t keep it if you use it.”

“May I kiss you, Katara?” he asks. His voice is painfully soft. She can hear the guilt all coiled up inside, the way a worm rots an apple from core to skin.

Why is she angry with him? She cannot remember her fury with the Fire Lord when she’s confronted with soft-spoken, gentle Zuko. She draws his lips down to hers, and the first kiss he gives her is feather-light, weightless, delicate as a spider’s thread caught in the wind.

His lips are chapped; he has been biting them. He pulls away, and leaves her wanting.

“My Internal Minister wants me to dissolve the Court and leave the city until the summer’s over and the worst of all this has died down.”

“What do you want, Zuko?”

“It wasn’t like this before,” he says. “There was never this chaos when my father and my grandfather were Fire Lord. The people knew their place. I want it to be like that again, I want to be the Fire Lord of people who obey me.”

“The people were afraid before. Isn’t it good that they don’t fear you? It’s the first step in making them love you.”

“They want to kill me.”

“They don’t know you. Disband the court like your Internal Minister wants, and go out into the countryside and let people talk to you about their grievances. You don’t even have to do anything. Just listen.”

“My Lady Treasurer said much the same thing,” he muses. “It might do us good to leave the city, just for the summer. People are always more defiant in the heat, and it will give my ministers time to reestablish order.”

“Will you talk to the people?” She asks. He looks at her, and she sees doubt flash across his features and vanish into the stillness of his visage. Briefly, she wonders if he has every spoken more than a few words to someone not born of nobility.

Not for the first time, she wonders whether he thought to marry into the Water Tribes, or if his uncle convinced him it would be the only way to prove a desire for peace after a century of conquest.

“I suppose there’s precedent for it. Tamar-Lin used to sit beneath a tegmin tree with a loaf of bread in his hand and a crown of apple flowers in his hair and speak with the commoners about their problems.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen you with flowers in your hair before,” she says, and he gives a little laugh that sends sparks of warmth shooting from her stomach to her heart. 

"My mother taught me to make flower crowns. It's how they do divination in the mountains." Katara's mother taught her how to lay bones in the fire, and read the future in the way the heat split them open.

"Perhaps you can show me," she says, and he smiles gently at her. His smile is warmer than the sun at her back. Her heart turns over uneasily, the way an baby stirs when a loud noises rouses her from her sleep.

"Of course," he says. "I think you'll like the countryside. The food's not as good, but there are always festivals in summer, and in the provinces the spirit days aren't nearly as stogy as they are in the city. My uncle used to take me and Lu Ten, and we'd wear masks and pretend to be peasants for a night. It was fun."

"I think I'd like that," she says, and he ducks his head as though suddenly scalded. She eats a sweet segment of nectarine, and his eyes follow the movement of her hands. There is silence, except for the sound of her chewing.

“I am sorry about yesterday,” he says at length, his voice soft. “I don’t want us to quarrel. I appreciate your advice, Katara.”

She draws his lips to hers and kisses him. Probably they should not cease from talking, probably they should do something about the fires that burn outside the window, deep in the city. He kisses her neck, and all her reservations crumble, the way spidersilk scatters in the face of a gale.

“I want you, Katara,” he murmurs, and his voice stirs embers buried in her skin. All of a sudden even the light silk of her nightdress is oppressive. He traces just his fingertips against her shoulder, and she feels every muscle in her body quiver in nervous anticipation. “I want to make you want me.”

She allows him to guide her down onto the carpeted floor, but when she tries to draw him on top of her, he pulls away to press delicate, teasing kisses up her legs. When she protests, shifting herself towards him, desperate for his touch, he stills her with one hot hand on her hips, and he lowers his mouth to press a chaste kiss to her core.

“Be good,” he orders, but there’s no bite to his words. She tangles her fingers in his hair, and tries to compel him, tries to force him to make good on his promises, but no matter how she urges him, he only teases her, kissing her without pressure, breathing soft words she does not understand over her center.

It’s only when she moans his name, agonized by the atomization of her want, that he draws her legs up over his shoulders and draws his tongue over her.

It is too much; she tries to twist away, but he holds her steady and continues to lick in steady revolutions, just a touch too slow to do much more than twist the coil of need tighter in her stomach. 

It’s too much and not enough, she can feel the pads of his fingers digging into the muscles of her thighs, she can feel the roughness of his scarred cheek against the skin of her legs, she can feel his breath against her, hot and uneven. He’s done this dozens of times, even before they came to their uneasy concord, but lying half-clothed on the floor of her bedroom, with an open window at her back and the dawn sun streaming in, a strange lump rises in her throat at the sight of him crouched between her legs.

He draws a slow circle around her center with his tongue, and then he sucks. The pressure after all his teasing is overwhelming, but it is only when he says her name, his voice ragged with want, that she feels the coil of tension break with a bright starburst.

A beam of sunlight has moved across the floor to embrace the plate of cut fruit. She can see each individual drop of juice, each sweating morsel, bright with dew.

Zuko lays his head on her stomach, and she runs her fingers through his hair.

Outside, the smoke begins to dissipate.


End file.
